


Paper Boy

by PresquePommes



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Baking, Body Worship, Drinking, Drunk Sex, Gardens & Gardening, M/M, Martial Arts, Neighbors, Oral Sex, Pets
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-05
Updated: 2015-02-11
Packaged: 2018-02-03 12:12:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 38,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1744205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PresquePommes/pseuds/PresquePommes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I tried to work as many ridiculous cliches into this as possible and somehow came out with the most awkwardly endearing neighbours AU I never knew I could write.</p><p>Now with extra awkward and a side of "You Probably Shouldn't Make Important Life Choices Based On That One Dude You Met, Like, A Month Ago."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [foreverautumn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/foreverautumn/gifts).



> I'm simultaneously inclined to apologize and to refuse any and all apologies and I'm not sure which impulse to give into.

It was just a newspaper.

Up until that exact moment, he’d considered his relationship with his neighbour civil, if not exactly friendly. In theory, it wasn’t hard to be friendly with someone who lingered on his porch on sunny days, but when that person responded to polite acknowledgement with a grunt or a terse nod, if at all, it became considerably harder.

He wasn’t particularly bothered by it- Eren wasn’t the type to go around knocking on neighbours’ doors to introduce himself, either. Really, the only reason they’d ever interacted in the first place was because of his dog.

And, well, his neighbour’s cat.

Cheddar _loved_ cats. Eren had thought his heart was going to give out when she had frozen in place halfway up the driveway, head turned and ears perked forwards.

He’d already been living in the house for more than two weeks without any issues, so he hadn’t been expecting her to bolt. He’d watched the leash jerk free from his fingers, shocked into stillness for a moment, eyes following her as she loped excitedly across the grass into the next yard.

What happened next had come to him not in slow-motion, but in snapshots of panicked recognition.

He’d seen the cat lounging on the hot pavement in front of the wooden steps of his neighbour’s porch.

 _‘Don’t run, don’t run,’_ he’d begged it silently.

He’d seen the man sitting in a wicker chair on the porch with a teacup in his hand and a small handgun on his armrest.

 _‘Don’t shoot, don’t shoot,’_ he’d pleaded in his mind.

He hadn’t been consciously aware of dashing after Cheddar, only that the house was growing closer in fits and spurts.

He’d seen the cat’s head lift from the ground, eyes opening and pupils contracting sharply.

He’d seen his neighbour’s head twitch towards his dog, free hand shooting out to his firearm.

His teacup hadn’t even wavered, and in retrospect, that had been what he’d found most frightening.

“She’s friendly!” he’d heard himself yell breathlessly as Cheddar closed in.

He’d watched the cat- suddenly standing with its side to his dog, ears half-cocked and eyes watchful- let Cheddar sniff it and held his breath.

_‘Don’t run, don’t run, don’t run.’_

Everything still would’ve been fine if it had batted or hissed at her- but if it’d ran, she’d have chased it.

When the cat had relaxed the defensive arch of its back and butted its dark head against Cheddar’s nose, he’d released all the air he’d been holding in an explosive sigh.

“I’m so sorry, she just really loves cats,” he’d apologized, turning his sheepish smile to the man on the porch, but only for a second.

His cat may have decided that Cheddar was good company, if the low rattling purr Eren heard was any indication, but the man himself had still been eying her warily, handgun gripped loosely in his fingers.

His eyes had flickered over to Eren briefly, light and piercing like the eyes of a husky.

“Sorry again,” Eren had mumbled, calling, “Cheddar!” and sighing when she barely spared him a flick of the ear, instead hunkering down to the ground and rolling over as the neighbour’s cat pranced playfully in front of her, batting harmlessly at her nose. “Cheddar, _come here_ ,” he’d commanded.

At first he hadn’t been sure if he’d really heard his neighbour’s quiet snort.

When he’d looked to him inquisitively, the man had fixed him with a slightly amused stare.

“Cheddar?”

He’d felt his cheeks and throat warm, and it hadn’t been from the sunlight. “A friend named her,” he’d said defensively, almost hearing Sasha’s insistent voice. “What’s wrong with a dog named Cheddar?”

“Your dog is a Doberman.”

He’d paused in his attempts to drag her away from the cat, furrowing his eyebrows, confused. “So?”

His neighbour had just hummed ambiguously.

He’d barely heard what he’d murmured as Eren had led Cheddar back across the lawn.

“Sounds like something a little kid would name a mutt.”

Up until that morning, he’d still been telling himself that he hadn’t responded because it’d been a stupid comment, not because he was embarrassed by how accurate it was.

Now, though, he was deciding he didn’t care.

“I said you’ve got some serious balls, you little shit. Are you deaf or just stupid?”

He held the unnerving gaze of his neighbour, increasingly puzzled. “I heard you,” he acknowledged, “I just have no idea what you’re talking about.”

A slim eyebrow quirked upwards in what he assumed was incredulity. “That’s my fucking newspaper,” came the murmur.

Eren glanced down at the roll of print in his hand and then into the twin mailboxes rooted side-by-side behind the sidewalk.

His mailbox had nothing but a brightly-coloured flyer in the bottom. His neighbour’s was empty.

The same flyer was wrapped around the newspaper in his hand.

“Oh,” he said intelligently.

He could almost hear the man scowling. “ _Oh_ ,” he mimicked mockingly.

At a loss, he shoved the mistakenly stolen newspaper back into the mailbox. “I really didn’t mean to, it was an honest mistake, I’m just used to bringing in the-”

His neighbour’s lip pulled up in a small sneer. “Sure,” he muttered, yanking the now crumpled paper back out of his mailbox and turning away.

Eren watched his retreating back with a rising feeling of indignation.

He was almost pleased when the man had to step carefully around the cat twining eagerly around his ankles to avoid falling up the porch stairs.

***

And with that, their relationship went from thoughtlessly amicable to decidedly not.

Resentment had wormed its way into his heart.

 _‘I didn’t do anything wrong,’_ he thought indignantly for the thousandth time, peering out the kitchen window with a scowl.

It was decisively too early for someone who didn’t have to work to be awake- _‘come to think of it, I’ve never seen him leave his house for anything but groceries. I bet he sells drugs or something,’_ Eren thought critically- but his neighbour was awake, nonetheless, hair neatly combed, back straight and muscular under a clean black shirt, hips canted slightly to the side and a knee casually bent inside a pair of crisp dark jeans.

 _‘He doesn’t even wear sweatpants or pyjamas in his own house like a normal person,’_ he thought judgementally.

_‘It’s this early and he’s got music on and his window open. Doesn’t he have any respect for other people?’_

The criticisms were never-ending.

_‘He cooks the yolks of his fried eggs until they’re solid. What a freak.’_

Most of them were petty, but in his mind, they were valid as a cumulative whole.

_‘Who butters their toast like that?’_

He blinked as a blur of black and white slipped from a chair onto the kitchen table, and then grinned.

The cat stood on the table, tail twitching lightly.

He saw his neighbour’s shoulder start to turn as he slid the eggs from the frying pan onto a plate, and grinned when the cat vanished back under the table before he’d finished turning around.

 _‘I hope he gets cat hair in his eggs,’_ he thought spitefully, taking a sip of his coffee.

He coughed, hastily setting his mug on the window ledge and pulling a piece of dark hair out of his mouth.

He shot Cheddar a glare.

She remained unperturbed.

***

Watching his neighbour- whose name, he discovered, was Levi- became a habit.

A hobby, of sorts.

Levi woke up early, rarely went anywhere, and seemed to make a point of fetching his newspaper before Eren could make off with it.

If he’d been intending to, which was what he seemed to assume.

_‘It’s just a fucking newspaper.’_

He wasn’t sure why how the man felt about his character mattered so much to him. He also didn’t care.

Eren was not especially given to fits of introspection. That was more Armin’s thing.

He felt a pang of homesickness and quashed it angrily, turning outwards again.

He’d learned a lot about Levi in the past week or so.

He never drank coffee, only tea. _‘What are you, some kind of health freak?’_

He listened to strange music. _‘Let me guess: I haven’t heard of them? Pretentious dick.’_

He cooked and ate his meals like clockwork. _‘How old are you, like, sixty?’_

He showered and dressed the moment he awoke. _‘Have you ever relaxed a day in your fucking life?’_

Today, he learned something new.

He wandered over to the living room, seeking a better vantage point.

 Levi was dragging his coffee table over to the side of the room.

Eren watched him fidget with something in the general area of the room he assumed his television stood. He couldn’t quite see.

After the third bout of adjusting, frowning and grumbling, something occurred to him.

 _‘Is that a camera?’_ he wondered with a malicious sort of glee.

He could think of a lot of ways someone could make money from home with only a camera, and most of them were rather risqué.

He felt assured of his own intelligence when Levi stripped off his shirt, folding it neatly and setting it on the coffee table with what looked like a sigh. 

Eren watched him mouth something to no one in particular with a strong look of irritation.

Levi fidgeted with the camera one last time and Eren sunk down on the couch to lessen his chance of being seen, eyes trained on the window across the yard.

And then Levi sank into a fighting pose.

He vaguely recognized it from watching Mikasa train, but he was suddenly mystified as to what Levi was doing.

When his pose shifted fluidly into another pose, and then another, eyes distant and expression bored, Eren had an epiphany.

 _‘He’s making a training video,’_ he thought, briefly awestruck for the moment he failed to remember that he hated Levi’s guts.

Even then, there was a strength and grace to his movements that he couldn’t bring himself to make fun of.

Levi repeated the transition again from a different angle.

And again.

And again.

It was too late when Eren suddenly realized he was facing the window. He saw Levi’s eyes focus on him.

Except for the tiniest widening of his eyes, Eren could barely tell he’d been noticed.

It didn’t seem to have broken Levi’s concentration.

He repeated the transition once more, facing the camera, and then paused.

Eren wasn’t sure if he was imagining the tiny smirk that curled the corner of his lips.

He didn’t have time to wonder.

Abruptly, Levi burst into a flurry of motion.

It was only after that Eren realized he’d been demonstrating the same poses in action rather than practice, and, traitorously, he suddenly wanted to see it again so he could pay closer attention.

But Levi was fidgeting with the camera again, and he didn’t spare so much as a glance towards the window as he left the room.

Eren slunk away, oddly dissatisfied.

***

It was surprisingly simple to find Levi’s instructional videos.

The website they were hosted on was the informational page for a local dojo, and Eren was delighted to discover that there was actually a question about them on the site’s Frequently Asked Questions page.

_Why doesn’t Levi ever do live demonstrations at the dojo?_

“ ‘ _Due to the advanced nature of Levi’s techniques and the comparatively less seasoned nature of most of the dojo’s students, it has been decided that having Levi’s demonstrations in accessible video format is more in keeping with the dojo’s high-efficiency teaching style. With Levi’s videos purchasable on demand, advanced students can watch and re-watch demonstrations as many times as necessary to perfect their own, something which would not be achievable with a live instructor_ ,’ ” Eren read aloud, and then laughed. “They probably just don’t want him there because he’s rude and impatient,” he whispered snidely.

Nonetheless, he watched every single of the short video samples available.

He reasoned that it wasn’t weird unless he actually bought something.

***

He liked playing his guitar more than he liked tuning it, but he’d only just begun to set his fingertips to the fretboard when Cheddar’s head lifted, ears perked forward.

She’d been dozing moments before, and he looked up, curious what had attracted her attention.

The neighbour’s cat was sauntering fluidly up the steps towards her.

He watched them sniff noses and failed to suppress a smile when the cat began to groom Cheddar’s snout in prim little strokes.

He could almost hear its rattling purr over the absentminded strings he was plucking.

“So you’re some kind of shitty voyeur,” his neighbour said out of nowhere, completely without prompting.

He fumbled with his instrument, producing a cringe-worthy dissonant _plunck_.

“What?” he asked, angry at himself for being nervous now that he knew the power contained in that small form.

Levi shot him a bored look. “You’ve been watching me.”

“You never close your curtains,” he retorted before realizing that he probably should’ve denied it altogether.

Levi’s eyebrows crept upwards incrementally, but he said nothing.

They stared at each in awkward silence, the still summer air broken only by the rattling purr of Levi’s cat and the happy panting of Eren’s dog.

“Do you play or do you just hold it and hope that’s enough?”

Eren’s hackles rose. “Yes, I fucking play,” he snapped. “I’m hoping to get into college for music, thanks.”

Levi hummed indifferently, still lingering awkwardly by the porch as his cat fell ungracefully onto its side and began to bat playfully at Cheddar’s nose.

He’d already gone back to finding his fingering when Levi spoke again.

“What happened to them?”

It took him a second to understand what he was referring to. When he looked up, Levi just jerked his chin towards the house instead of repeating himself.

“They’re on vacation,” he answered shortly, still sullen. “They asked me to housesit for the summer. I’m applying to a college nearby, so I thought it could be a good opportunity.” He politely refrained from mentioning that, aside from one particular neighbour, he liked everything about the area so far.

Levi hummed again. Eren scowled at him.

“Do you want something?”

“You said you play. So play.”

Eren stared at him.

And he did play, for a while. He played long enough that he glanced over at one point to find Cheddar and the cat curled up together in a late-afternoon sunbeam.

Eventually, the weight of Levi’s awkward lingering become too heavy.

“Do you want to sit down or something?” he asked abruptly, slapping his hand down on the strings to cut off the reverberations of his last few notes.

Levi looked at the porch he was sitting cross-legged on. “When was the last time you swept?” Eren watched his mouth work distastefully. “You have no chairs.”

Eren sighed loudly. “Then do you want to move to _your_ porch, then, if you’re going to hang around anyway?”

Levi wrinkled his nose.

“I don’t want to be seen with you.”

***

And that was how he ended up in Levi’s backyard.

It was fenced off from the rest of the world, and now he knew why-

It was a _garden_.

Flowers on one side, herbs and vegetables on the other.

Eren stared at Levi’s immaculately cultivated lilies and clung to his guitar nervously.

 _How_ he’d ended up in Levi’s backyard was simple- Levi had ushered him through his house, demanding he take off his shoes at the front door only to slip them on again at the back door, an act which left him with only the vaguest impression of a crisp and somewhat minimalistic living space and a very distinct memory of floors so fastidiously white they made the fabric of his socks look grey and the rubber soles of his sneakers look yellow- but _why_ was still a mystery to him.

He felt like he’d been silently hustled into complying, and he wasn’t sure how or why Levi had done it.

They were supposed to hate each other.

This was all very unnatural.

He fidgeted uncomfortably, perching on the edge of a wicker chair with a rich navy cushion and plucking at his strings as Levi unlatched a gate and let Cheddar in.

Eren stared at her.

Eren stared at Levi.

Levi stared back.

“Why didn’t we just go around the side?”

Levi continued to stare.

“Why would we?” he asked, as though Eren’s question made no sense.

Eren furrowed his eyebrows, absentmindedly strumming the same chord over and over as he tried to make sense of what was happening.

“It can only be unlatched from the inside,” Levi explained belatedly, after an increasingly awkward, g-minor punctuated pause.

“Then why didn’t you just tell me to go around the house and wait for you to unlatch the gate?”

Levi opened his mouth, closed his mouth, and frowned like a teacher facing a student with a particularly poor attitude. “Why do you ask so many shitty questions?”

Eren shrugged, baffled, and began to play snatches of songs interspersed with half-meant improvisations.

He wasn’t sure if the silence that stretched between him and Levi could be considered comfortable.

It was charged, but he wasn’t sure how.

Reading the atmosphere wasn’t one of his strong points. That was more Armin’s thing, just like introspection.

“Do you want something to eat?” Levi asked him suddenly without warning, which was how he was starting to suspect Levi opened all social interactions.

Despite his disinclination towards spending time thinking seriously about things, especially towards spending time considering the motivations of other people after he’d made up his mind about them, he was starting to suspect that Levi wasn’t actually wholly rude- he seemed bizarrely confident about his own abruptness, as though aggressively embracing his own awkwardness could somehow offset being incredibly and incurable socially inept.

Eren suspected he’d stumbled upon the real reason Levi didn’t do live demonstrations at the dojo.

“Yeah, sure,” Eren responded fluidly, clearly better equipped to hold up the flow of conversation than Levi was.

***

“Who the fuck doesn’t have flour in their house?” Eren complained for the third or thousandth time as he hustled his way into Levi’s kitchen and dumped the bag he’d brought from next door on the counter.

He had powdery white streaks on his the dark fabric of his shirt.

Levi stared at them awkwardly like he was trying to decide how to comment. He waited.

Begrudgingly, he’d begun to enjoy Levi’s eccentricities.

He was weird as hell, but he was never boring.

“You look like somebody’s been doing lines of coke off your chest,” Levi said finally.

 _‘Nailed it,’_ Eren thought, smiling privately in a way that could have been misinterpreted as affectionate by someone who didn’t recognize his and Levi’s non-friendship as the inexplicable oddity it was. “Why would someone do coke off a t-shirt?” He asked, rolling with it.

“They wouldn’t,” Levi mumbled, frowning.

Eren couldn’t contain his snort. “Just get me the fucking sugar.”

***

The first time Levi showed up on his doorstep in the middle of the night, he wasn’t sure what to make of it.

Briefly, he started to _wonder_.

Mercifully, Levi’s attitude put an end to that.

“You stay up too fucking late. The light from your room is distracting,” he groused, shifting from foot to foot on Eren’s porch.

“Okay,” Eren allowed, a little confused. “Do you want me to turn it off?”

Levi frowned. “No.”

“Uh. Okay,” Eren repeated, a little more confused.

They stared at each other for a few more seconds before Levi scowled, spun on his heel and walked home.

Eren didn’t think about it too much.

***

Levi’s discovery that Eren had worked in a bakery throughout his teenage years and Eren’s discovery that Levi knew how to correctly use herbs and spices had given birth to a relationship born of pragmatism.

He refused to see it as anything else.

“ _Eren,_ ” Armin’s voice explained patiently, sounding hollow and tinny over speakerphone, “ _you’ve been eating two or three meals a day with this guy for almost a month. You leave the window cracked open so his cat can wander into your house and hang out with your dog in the middle of the night. He leaves his back door unlatched so she can get out in the middle of the night even though he doesn’t usually seem to let her out unless he’s out with her._ ”

“So?” Eren yawned, unperturbed. “Our pets like each other and we’re cool with that, what’s your point?”

“ _Eren, he showed up on your doorstep at one in the morning to complain about something he didn’t even want you to change._ ”

“He’s a weird guy,” Eren excused airily.

He could _hear_ Armin trying not to sigh into the receiver. “ _Have you thought about this at all? About any of it?_ ”

“Yeah. Yes,” he lied unabashedly.

There was a pregnant pause that told him everything he needed to know about how little Armin had bought into his claim.

“ _Tell me about him, Eren. Just… just talk about him to me._ ”

“He’s a weird guy, I told you,” Eren repeated, furrowing his eyebrows in concentration as he sketched another figure, eyes flickering up to the screen capture he was working from. He was pleased with the quality of the videos- there wasn’t much blurring even in the action frames. The slowness of the initial poses and transitions made for crisper stills, but he preferred the movement and energy of the faster takes, even if they compromised the clarity of his references.

He’d always liked to draw. It wasn’t something he planned to pursue- it was just something he did.

He pinched his tongue between his teeth as he rounded out a calf muscle.

“ _What does he look like?_ ”

“Short,” Eren murmured absentmindedly, lighting shading the fluid lines of muscularity into something more closely resembling their true tension in a moment of exertion. “Dark hair. Kind of ripped, but not in a gross way. Sleepy eyes, like the kind that look bored or pissed all the time. It’s hard to explain.”

“ _What would you say if someone asked you if he was good-looking?_ ”

Eren shrugged without thinking about the fact that Armin couldn’t see him doing it. “I’d say yeah. He’s kind of sexy in a weird way.” He pursed his lips, pausing for a moment. “If you’re into that.”

This time Armin really did sigh. It crackled through the speaker.

“ _Eren, if he made a move on you, what would you do?_ ”

Eren stopped completely, staring at the cellphone resting on the floor beside his sketchbook like it could read and communicate his incredulity to Armin somehow. “He wouldn’t. We don’t even like each other. What kind of question is that?”

“ _What are you drawing right now, Eren?_ ”

He was about to ask Armin how he knew he was drawing when he realized something that hadn’t seemed very important until that exact moment.

He was drawing Levi.

“Oh no,” he breathed, suddenly uncomfortable and not entirely willing to contemplate why.

“ _Oh yes,_ ” Armin laughed softly, much too far away to offer any real help.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eren Jaeger, smooth as a twelve-car pileup.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd intended for this to be more and longer, but I ran out of steam. This chapter also contains less amusing cliches and more Eren being a stubbornly oblivious moron. I'm not sure what happened. It just sort of happened.

He wasn’t entirely certain just how they’d ended up in this situation.

Rationally, he understood the progression of events as it had occurred- he’d taken Armin’s gentle nudges towards introspection to heart and had begun looking at Levi through different eyes.

In a fit of impulsive action that had made perfect sense at the time for reasons he could no longer recall- a rather common occurrence in Eren’s life- he’d decided to test the boundaries of their peculiar comradeship, giving little to no thought to the possible consequences.

He’d kissed Levi, and he still couldn’t decide if he’d done it purely out of curiosity about what would happen or if he’d actually wanted to.

What _had_ happened was that Levi had gone stiff, and when Eren had pulled away, he’d found himself locked in a wide-eyed, tight-lipped staring contest which had ended in Levi suddenly blinking, grabbing him by the shirt collar, and dragging him back in with a ferocity he couldn’t have predicted.

He understood that much.

What he didn’t understand was how exactly he’d gone from making out with Levi backed against the kitchen counter to lying flat on his back on the couch with Levi kneeling over him.

They were in an entirely different _room_ and he had only the vaguest recollection of knocking over a salt shaker in his eagerness before being edged away from the counter and into the living room.

He had some memory of backing into a kitchen chair and laughing. He was almost sure Levi had nipped him sharply on the lip for it. The lingering sting seemed to corroborate his foggy thoughts.

It was hard to concentrate with his hands buried in Levi’s hair and Levi’s tongue flickering cautiously into his mouth.

He smelled good. Musky, lightly floral, and strangely heady.

Eren couldn’t get enough of it, and he wasn’t willing to spend long thinking on why.

When Levi broke the kiss to suck in a deep breath, his nose bumping against Eren’s, Eren found words again.

“So does this mean-” he started, and then frowned anxiously when Levi froze.

Levi was looking at him expectantly, husky-bright eyes wary and watchful.

“So does this mean we’re friends now or something?” he asked reluctantly.

Levi sat back in his haunches and stared at him with a blankly incredulous look.

“Were you dropped on your head as a child?”

***

Their relationship didn’t change significantly after that.

He didn’t see why it would, really. That would require thinking about it for more than the time it had taken him to decide definitively that he was not going to tell Armin about this development until he absolutely had to.

Armin would make him think about it, and he was content to leave things unexamined and unexplained for now.

He watched Levi shoo Cheddar out of his vegetable garden for the third time that afternoon, smiling when he shot him a dirty look. Levi’s expression turned unreadable with a helping of sly at precisely the moment that something small but heavy leapt into his lap.

“Oh, it’s you,” he murmured to the cat as she turned pale yellow eyes on him and blinked slowly, kneading her paws into his midsection. He noticed, not for the first time, that she had a similar facial structure to her owner in some ways- despite her friendly nature, her narrow eyes and raw, husky voice gave her an air of being generally disgusted by everything.

He grimaced as he discovered that his bladder was fuller than he’d suspected. The rhythm of her paws pushing into his stomach wasn’t exactly helping.

“Okay, cat, you’re really cute, but-”

“Cat?”

He paused, glancing up at Levi, who was giving him a weird look.

“How do you still not know my cat’s name?” Levi asked him, expression set in a familiar odd mixture of stormy and amused.

He shrugged helplessly, scratching her behind the ears and attempting to gently coax her off his lap. “You always call her, like, _‘you little shit’_ or something like that,” he defended. “Most of the time you don’t call her anything, it’s just _‘oi, what are you staring at’_ or _‘I’ve already fed you, lardass’_ or-” He mulled it over. “Something like that,” he repeated lamely.

“Lardass is a name too,” Levi pointed out, gingerly sweeping some of the soil Cheddar had displaced in her excited bounding back into the garden with the edge of his shoe. “Her name is Duchess.”

There was a pregnant pause in which Eren had no words.

“I didn’t name her,” Levi said defensively.

“Uh-huh,” Eren hummed.

Levi scowled at him. “At least she’s not named after food.”

Eren mouthed his words back to him with a sour expression, moving to shove a purring and insistent Duchess off of his lap.

Levi made a warning sound deep in his throat. “What do you think you’re doing?”

He grimaced. “I have to piss.”

He received a blank, pitiless stare in response. “You don’t move cats until they want to move. That’s how cats work.”

“But I have to piss,” he protested as Duchess sat down and stretched across his legs, one paw resting possessively on his forearm.

Levi just looked at him.

“Hold it in.”

***

Three days later, Levi showed up on his doorstep in the middle of the night for the second time.

“How old are you?” he demanded without preface or explanation, as expected. Eren briefly wondered if he’d find it disconcerting at this point if Levi actually went about starting a conversation with him the normal way.

Eren paused to stare at him, still halfway through fumbling the screen door open.

“You said you were applying to college here, so you have to be at least eighteen, right?” he snarled. Eren blinked, taken aback by his apparent urgency and the unexpected look of anxiety in his eyes. “You’re not fucking sixteen or something, are you? How fucking old are you?”

“I’m-” He’d been dozing when Levi had knocked, and residual sleepiness made his voice crack pubescently on the first word out of his mouth. He watched Levi’s eyes widen incrementally in what he’d learned to recognize as alarm. “I’m twenty,” he sighed, groggy and more than slightly unimpressed by the question. “I took a couple years off after high school. Jesus Christ, what time is it?”

The sun wasn’t coming up yet, so it was earlier than four, he decided.

The tension in Levi’s shoulders broke under what was unmistakeably relief. “Oh. Good,” he said firmly, adding a mumbled, “thanks.”

“Thanks for what, being older than eighteen?” Eren yawned, still trying to decide if he was annoyed or amused. He felt the outline of his phone in the left pocket of his hoodie and fished it out. “You couldn’t wait to ask me when it wasn’t two in the morning?”

Levi shuffled awkwardly on his porch but said nothing.

His sluggish brain used what little clarity it had mustered to lurch headfirst into a connection.

He squinted at Levi through the screen. “Wait, you made out with me without knowing if I was old enough to make out with?”

“You started it, so I just assumed-” Levi faltered and fidgeted some more, frowning at a smear of dirt on the welcome mat. He didn’t look like he bought his own excuse, and Eren suspected his next words were more to the point of what had actually happened. “I didn’t think to ask until someone asked me.”

He was leaning towards amused. “Who were you telling about me?”

For a split-second, and _only_ for a split-second, Levi looked like he was staring into the face of an oncoming train or looking down the barrel of a gun, and then it was gone, smoothed away under a look of annoyance. “No one.”

A split-second was more than long enough.

Eren grinned at him. “Who were you talking to at this hour in the morning that would’ve asked you how old I was?” he pressed, possessed by curiosity. Something gleeful and malevolent awoke in him when Levi’s cool façade cracked a little.

His expression was such a distinctive mixture of stubbornly manufactured indifference and thinly-disguised nervous guilt that it evoked in Eren’s mind an image of a small child trying to deny being caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “Nobody,” he muttered petulantly, crossing his arms over his chest and shuffling uncomfortably again. “I’m going home.”

Eren smiled at him. “You don’t want to come in?”

He hesitated.

Eren could see him hesitating.

He finished unlatching the screen door and nudged it open a crack in invitation.

Levi stared at the space between the door and the doorframe with wide, unreadable eyes for a moment before rubbing his hand over his face. “I’m going home,” he repeated again, a little louder and more forcefully than before, like he was trying to convince someone it was true. “Thanks.”

“Thanks for being twenty?” Eren teased, calling after him as he trotted stiffly down the porch stairs.

He couldn’t be certain, but he thought he heard Levi mumble,

“ _Yeah_.”

He didn’t realize he was grinning until he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the darkened glass of the kitchen window.

He resolved not to think too much about that, either.

***

Not thinking about things that probably warranted some reflection was an experience somewhat like taking out a bank loan.

He could pay his interest in fits and spurts in those moments of shallow introspection that invariably visited him whilst walking the dog or during particularly long visits to the bathroom, but ultimately, the mental loan he’d taken out would come due sooner or later.

Much like the loans he knew lay in his future if he wanted to attend college, as well as the few conversations with his father about his finances he’d faced already, he was avoiding stress by simply pretending it didn’t exist.

Having a distraction aided his efforts.

Unfortunately, like so many others who had come before him and similarly indulged in what heavily-accented grandmothers lovingly referred to as “taking hair of the dog that bit you” to escape the negative implications posed by the pup in question- or, more commonly, the alcoholic beverage and accompanying hangover the dog and its bite euphemistically represented-  Eren did not give special consideration to the fact that embracing Levi as his distraction of choice was only compounding the interest on the loan he’d taken out.

With any introspective urges stowed firmly away like winter jackets at a nightclub coat check in December and the question of his ability to legally consent to be there with a proverbial drink in his hand comfortably confirmed, sometimes it really didn’t seem like there was a loan at all.

When he slipped into a state of hyperfocus he had not yet realized was unique to him and others of his particular make and model, indulging longer and longer moments of intense preoccupation with the details of what he was looking at, he failed to notice that the comfortably awkward cadence of another half-nonsensical conversation with Levi was fading into background noise he could barely maintain his end of.

He was busy mapping the movements of Levi’s lips when he spoke, busy calculating the angles at which a light source would have to hit the line of his jaw to prevent it from shadowing a trio of dark freckles he spotted on the near side of his throat, busy reconstructing the rolling contractions of his muscles through his shirt as he shifted his position on the couch, and he was especially busy being utterly unaware of what he was doing.

He only noticed something was amiss when Levi fell silent.

It was then that he realized that his eyes were lingering somewhere in the vicinity of Levi’s collarbones and dragged them back up to his face with a belated of hum of inquisition.

Levi was looking at him with undisguised amusement.

“Go somewhere nice?”

“Huh?” It was all he could muster. He was still very distracted- more so than before, even, because Levi had his arm draped over the back of the couch and Eren had inhaled a heady lungful of his scent when he’d lifted his head.

“Did you go somewhere nice?” Levi repeated, amused expression fading into something that seemed a little more frustrated as well as slightly uncomfortable. “You left. In your head, I mean. It was a joke.”

“Oh.” Levi smelled amazing and more than half of his brain was still preoccupied with being distracted by that fact, but he thought he could manage some semblance of normalcy. They were making jokes, not discussing astrophysics. “Somewhere nice? Is your body nice? Yeah, it is, so yeah, I guess I did.”

Halfway through the second sentence, he started to recognize what he was saying for the trainwreck it was, but by the time he had properly grasped it, the words were already out of his mouth and lingering on the air between them.

Levi was just staring at him.

“Uh,” Eren added intelligently.

“What the fuck am I supposed to say to that?” Levi asked him, visibly perplexed.

“Uh,” he responded helpfully, and then had a brilliant thought.

 _‘Fuck it. Just fuck it,’_ he decided, and climbed into Levi’s lap without sparing himself another thought to second guess the wisdom of his impulse.

He wasn’t sure what kind of response he’d get, almost entirely due to the fact that he hadn’t stopped to consider the possibilities, so what he got was simultaneously anticlimactic and worrying.

“Oh.” Levi’s hands lingered awkwardly in the air like he wasn’t entirely sure what to do with them. His eyes flickered down to Eren’s legs where they eclipsed his own and up to Eren’s expectant face. “I have to take a piss. Get off.”

Eren frowned. “I wasn’t allowed to move Duchess when I had to go,” he pointed out, starting to regret his impulsiveness.

“You’re not a cat. That rule only applies to cats.”

He slipped off of Levi’s lap feeling distinctly mortified.

He was beginning to contemplate going home to escape further embarrassment when Levi came back. Eren felt the weight of his eyes on him when he sat back down.

The silence stretched on for far longer than could be considered comfortable by anyone.

“You can come back, you know.”

It was a quiet, inexplicable declaration. Eren shot him a confused look.

“You can come back now,” Levi mumbled, “if you want to. I just had to take a piss.”

Eren took him up on the offer. The sinister sense of an unpaid bill finally coming due vanished as soon as Levi’s hands found his waist.

He put off facing it just a little longer, and in return, it grew a little heavier and a lot more menacing.

***

They didn’t talk about what they did together- not when it was happening, not when it was done.

It tended to happen explosively, starting without warning and stopping either after it had tapered off into idle kissing or when it was interrupted, at which point they went back to behaving as though it had never happened.

If he’d been thinking about it, he would’ve rationalized it as being unimportant. It seemed juvenile to make a big deal out of a little making out and the occasional bout of short-lived grinding or heavy petting, especially when they did everything through their clothes.

As it was, he wasn’t thinking about it at all.

Except, of course, for when he _was_ thinking about it, which just so happened to be literally all of the time he was near Levi and a rather sizeable amount of the time he was not.

The urge to engage in more and better screwing around was kept in check only by Levi himself, who, Eren had discovered, was a cautious and rather stubborn partner when it came to screwing around for no other reason than for the sake of screwing around.

He was doggedly persisting in his attempt to distract Levi from his cooking when he spotted a light blinking on the table- which just so happened to have been where he’d left his phone.

He wandered into the living room to return the call he’d missed.

“Armin,” he greeted, feeling the smile and meaning it.

“ _Sorry, are you busy? You haven’t called in a couple of days, so I was wondering if something had happened._ ”

He was about to protest that he had, in fact, called Armin the day before when he realized that he hadn’t.

Nor had he the day before that.

Both days he’d lingered in Levi’s living room and kitchen until he was kicked out, returning the next morning after a hasty shower and a cup of coffee.

“Oh shit, sorry.” He wasn’t sure how it had happened. “No, nothing’s happened. I’ve just been hanging out with Levi.”

Armin hummed in a way that immediately alerted him to the fact that he probably should have lied. “ _Are you with him right now?_ ”

“No,” Eren lied.

“ _It’s rare that you don’t have your phone on you,_ ” Armin continued as though Eren hadn’t just lied outrageously to him, which was fair enough, he supposed, “ _what have the two of you been doing that’s so distracting?_ ”

“Uh,” Eren explained convincingly, “nothing much? Hanging out?”

He assumed Armin may have been more inclined to believe him if he hadn’t answered like he was asking Armin to decide for him.

His best friend’s sigh echoed through the speaker into his ear. “ _Eren, how old is he?_ ”

“Uh,” he said again, suddenly uncomfortably aware of how little right he’d had to make fun of Levi for forgetting to ask his age. “Levi,” he called into the kitchen, cradling the phone against his chest, “how old are you?”

Levi shot him a bemused stare. “Thirty-four.”

“Oh,” Eren said, less because he cared personally and more because he was pretty sure Armin would. “Twenty-four?” he lied into the receiver, wincing when the words came out so fragile and questioning that even Cheddar wouldn’t be convinced by them, and she could be coerced into chasing an imaginary ball for hours before she’d catch on.

“ _He’s thirty-four, isn’t he._ ”

It was funny, he thought, that Armin’s question sounded less like a question than his answer had. “No?”

Armin’s sigh rattled through the phone’s speaker so loudly it sounded like he was caught in a wind tunnel.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oh shit, a semblance of a plot is starting to appear!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I still don't know what I'm doing. This shit is just sort of growing on its own.
> 
> I, uh, upped the rating because Eren did a thing and while nothing's happened yet, I am not at all ruling out that possibility of my being possessed by the ghosts of Pornmas Past, Present, and Future.

“ _Eren, I know you._ ”

Eren had no doubt he did. He and Armin had too much history between them to leave room for doubt.

“ _You throw yourself into things whole-heartedly- and that’s great, it really is! It’s one of the things I admire most about you._ ”

He paced anxiously, glancing into the kitchen to ensure that Levi was still occupied. “Thanks,” he said stiffly. He didn’t have to ask to know that Armin wasn’t finished.

Much like his dog, Eren was better equipped to read meaning in tone than diction- after years of pointless fights and time wasted over simple miscommunications, he was understood by his friends and family to be the one who always called instead of texting.

He recognized Armin’s tone as one of reprimand, not praise.

“ _But you’re reckless. You leap before you look-_ ” He was about to protest, but Armin cut him off. “ _And I know you can take the fall, and I know you know you can, but you don’t have to. There are better ways of doing things than just… rushing into them headfirst and hoping for the best, Eren._ ”

“I don’t understand.” He didn’t.

On a number of levels, at that.

He heard Armin inhale and knew that he was settling in for a longer conversation than he’d originally budgeted his time for. “ _Eren, you’re not even sure you want to go to school there yet._ ”

He bristled defensively. “Hey, they’ve got one of the best music programs in-”

“ _See? There it is. You’re already doing it._ ”

He furrowed his eyebrows, confused. “Doing what?”

“ _Letting the wrong things be reasons to make up your mind about something that could affect the rest of your life. I didn’t tell you not to go to school there- I said you weren’t sure if you wanted to, which is what you said to me the last time we talked about it._ ” He could picture Armin’s weary look all too clearly. “ _The only thing that’s changed between then and now is your relationship with Levi._ ”

The room suddenly felt too small to breathe in and his tongue suddenly felt too large to swallow around. “It’s not like that,” he whispered urgently. “We’re not like that.”

“ _You’re an adult, I can’t-_ ” Armin paused and laughed quietly, which could’ve been start of a nice change of atmosphere if Eren hadn’t recognized it as the sort of dry chuckle Armin let loose whenever he knew he was powerless to prevent something from happening. “ _Even when we were kids, nobody could stop you from doing exactly what you wanted to,_ ” came the murmur, both affectionate and resigned. “ _I just don’t want you going into this blind. Eren, I can’t stop you from pretending this isn’t important enough to you that it’s affecting your judgement, but this time there’s more at stake than your girlfriend getting fed up with waiting and going to prom with Jean. If you let this sway your decision, you need to go into it knowing what that means._ ”

“And what does that mean?” His voice sounded tense, angry. Abruptly, he realized that he _was_ angry. “What exactly does that mean, Armin? Because last time I checked,” he hissed into the receiver, “you were the same age as me! How would you know? You’re pretty smart, Armin, but there’s a big fucking difference between learning something from other people and learning it yourself!”

Armin fell silent for a moment.

“ _I know that. But I also know you, and there’s a science to predicting what’s going to happen next when someone makes a decision. It’s cause and effect, Eren. I’m not psychic- I can’t tell you what will happen, and I wouldn’t be able to do that even if I had done it myself. But I can tell you what’s probably going to happen._ ”

“And what’s _probably_ going to happen, Armin?” he muttered, staring out into the darkening street with his free arm wrapped defensively around his middle.

He could hear rustling in the background and knew Armin was pacing. “ _That depends on him._ ” He made a noise of protest. “ _Just- just bear with me for a second. He’s older than you- a lot older. He’s got his own house, his own car, a stable source of income- and he’s already been through everything you’re just getting into._ ”

“We’re not like-”

“ _Not like that, I know, you told me. Humour me?_ ”

He obliged, only half-listening as he stewed in his own feelings of hurt and offense.

“ _Eren, you’re the sort of person who has to make his own mistakes to learn from them,_ ” Armin’s voice told him gently. “ _Older people, no matter what kind of relationship you have with them, are going to try to give you advice- because they have been there, and they have done that, so they feel like what they have to say is useful. And it is, most of the time, for most people. But not for you._ ”

He watched a raccoon meander up a neighbour’s driveway.

“ _It doesn’t matter what he is to you or what you are to him, you’re not going to take his advice, Eren, and he’s probably not going to understand that. And even if he does, that’s almost- it takes a very…_ ” He wasn’t used to hearing Armin struggle to articulate himself, and the realization that he wasn’t sure how to say something snapped Eren out of his sulking and into a state of intense focus.“ _People… people who can really, honestly look at someone making a mistake they were warned about, people who can see that without saying ‘I told you so’ or getting upset that their advice wasn’t taken are… it’s not a normal thing. You have to have made a lot of bad decisions and you have to have seen a lot of bad decisions made, and you don’t come out of that without having problems, Eren. I mean, I like to believe that I won’t get upset if you don’t take my advice, because I know you’re not going to take my advice anyway, so I shouldn’t, but I know I’m going to get frustrated with you anyway- because that’s normal. That’s a normal response._ ”

“I don’t understand what we’re talking about anymore,” Eren ventured. There was a halo of apprehension lining the edges of his confusion. He didn’t like it.

“ _We’re talking about why this is a bad idea. Not that I mean that you shouldn’t consider going to school there at all, no! No, that’s not what I mean._ ” Eren paced away from the window to stand by the door. He considered going out onto the porch. He suddenly felt much too warm. “ _What I mean is… how you’re approaching the situation right now,_ ” he said delicately. “ _If you let Levi be a deciding factor in why you go to school there, you’re going to have to face that for rest of college. If he decides he can’t handle how you are and things go south between you, you’re not going to be able to run away to my place to escape that like you did in high school. You won’t be able to drop out, either- you know your dad won’t pay for you to go somewhere else after you’ve dropped out of one school unless you go into a science major. This is the only shot you’re going to get at music, Eren. I don’t want anybody to screw that up for you._ ”

“I know.” It was barely a whisper. “I appreciate that.”

“ _If you get really involved with this guy- in any way, so don’t go going ‘it’s not like that’ at me again- it will change how this plays out for you, Eren. It could be in a good way, it could be in a bad way- but it’s going to be some kind of way, I know you too well to believe that there’s even a chance of this just tapering off and not mattering to you anymore._ ”

He opened the door, changed his mind, and closed it again, hand still lingering on the knob. “So what do you think is gonna happen, then?”

“ _Either he’s going to get frustrated and things are going to break down between you or he’s going to try to… fix you and control you and then things are going break down between you as soon as he realizes he can’t. That depends on how patient he is._ ”

“Not very,” Eren murmured quietly, smiling despite himself.

Armin’s laugh was a welcome change from earlier. “ _Good. You shouldn’t be indulged too much, you start picking fights with seniors and acting like you’re invincible when that happens- and no, it wasn’t ‘just that one time’, so don’t even say it,_ ” he teased before continuing. “ _Look, even if it turns out that he’s the kind of person who really can accept that you’re going to make a ton of mistakes and there’s nothing any of us can do about it, that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s going to want to help you clean up your messes like Mikasa and I do. Even if it seems like someone is letting you mess up without judging you for it for good reasons, a lot of the time that just means they don’t care enough to worry about you hurting yourself, and you need somebody to worry about you sometimes, Eren._ ”

“Armin,” he interjected carefully, “why do you know so much about this?”

There was a very long pause.

“ _I don’t,_ ” Armin finally answered, voice so infused with careless good cheer that it was jarring. “ _We’ll catch up next time we see each other, okay? Anyway, I’ll let you get back to whatever you were doing. We’ll talk later. Don’t forget to call Mikasa and your mom, too._ ”

“Okay,” Eren agreed, numb and perplexed. “Are you sure you’re-”

He pulled the silent phone from his ear and stared down at the stopped timer indicating the call had ended.

“You planning on eating tonight or are you waiting until you have to take a dump to make room?”

He jumped at the low, uninflected voice behind him, clutching his cellphone to his chest.

Levi was staring at him from the door to the kitchen, hands fidgeting at his sides like he wasn’t entirely sure what to do with them.

“Yeah,” Eren replied, and then blinked. “I mean no. Yes, I’m planning on eating, no, I’m not waiting until I have to take a dump.” He fumbled his phone into his pocket. Having it in his hands while Levi was looking at him made him feel strangely guilty. “Thanks for making dinner.”

Levi snorted through his nose, turning on his heel and stalking back into the kitchen. “Thank me by eating it before it goes cold, you shit.”

Eren trotted after him, his smile resurfacing.

***

Halfway through dinner, his mouth started _saying_ things, as it so often did when he took out mental loans and let the emotional interest on them accumulate to a point that made him grateful that no one was keeping track of his inner credit score.

Except Armin, maybe, he realized.

“That was my best friend on the phone,” he said without meaning to after ten minutes spent trying to ignore Armin’s words playing on repeat in the back of his mind.

“Yeah?”

It wasn’t that Levi didn’t care, he told himself and his mental Armin firmly. _‘Not that he should care. We don’t even like each other all that much,’_ he brooded.

“Did you just feel like telling me that for no reason, then?” Levi asked him, and Eren twitched, looking up from where he’d been pushing food around on his plate.

“Huh? No, I-” He considered what he had been thinking about telling Levi, and while he thought about it, it escaped his unattended lips. “Armin thinks I’m choosing to go to school here for the wrong reasons.” It was the second thing of the evening he did not intend to say. It would not be the last.

Levi finished chewing before setting down his cutlery primly and fixing him with a slightly bored look. “You might be. Do you think they’re the wrong reasons?”

Eren just sat and looked at him for a long moment. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t think so?”

Levi hummed understandingly as he picked up his teacup.

Eren waited, increasingly restless with every second that passed.

“He says I’m the sort of person who has to make my own mistakes to learn from them,” he blurted out, frustrated by how loud his thoughts seemed to sound in the silence, “and then he tells me all this shit that he thinks is going to happen anyway, so I can- I don’t know, stress myself out over shit he knows I’m going to do anyway? So he can say he told me it would happen?”

In the blurred peripheries of his vision, it looked a little like Levi was smiling, but by the time he’d raised his head, those lips were flat and uninterested.

“No. Your friend’s not wrong,” Levi told him frankly. “It’s never just one decision you make. There are always other decisions that have to be made after the shitshow your first decision creates starts to fuck with other parts of your life. If you’re determined to make a shitty decision that goes against the advice of everyone you know, knowing what could happen next might make it easier to make that next decision in a way that doesn’t get you into even more shit than you’re already in.” He directed a strange little smirk at the nothingness over Eren’s left shoulder. “Unless you want to fuck up your life on purpose. Depends what you’re into.”

Eren stared at him blankly.

Levi looked mildly back at him. “He’s not wrong. You’re not wrong either.” Eren’s eyes followed his teacup from his lips to the table. “Is he the same age as you?”

“Yeah, but-”

“Not fucking up seems a lot more important when you’re a kid.” There was something about Levi’s tone that kept distracting him from the doubts he was mulling in, but he couldn’t quite place it. “Look, before you shit yourself thinking too hard about what you’re supposed to do and if it’s going to fuck up your life-”

Eren didn’t realize he was leaning forward over the table until he accidently set his elbow down on the edge of his plate, sending his food cascading dangerously towards his placemat. He scrambled to correct his mistake.

Levi just looked amused, but not particularly concerned. “You’re going to fuck up.”

“I know, I just did,” he mumbled, mortified.

Levi snorted. “I noticed, and if I find out that mat is stained, you’re eating out of the same bowl as your goddamn dog from now on. But no, I mean you’re going to make shitty decisions and fuck up your life.”

Eren looked up at him, scandalized.

He could see amusement tugging at the corner of Levi’s lips. “You’re going to fuck up,” he said matter-of-factly, “it’s not just that you’re allowed to fuck up, you’re _going_ to, and you’re going to do it regardless of whether you mean to or not, so you might as well just fucking relax.”

He found himself searching for meaning in the wry look that passed over the pale eyes staring through him from across the table.

“Eren,” Levi said, and the unexpected sound of his name on those lips sent a strange jolt up Eren’s spine. “It doesn’t matter if you make your decisions based on logic or gut feeling, you’re going to fuck up, and the only thing that’s going to make you fuck up worse is obsessing over making the right decision. There’s no right decision. Just fucking do what you want to and deal with what happens next.”

There was something incredibly comforting and desirable about that thought.

“I want-” he started and then clammed up, abruptly aware that what he wanted at that exact moment was going to seem extremely strange following their conversation.

“You want…?” Levi prompted impatiently, pouring himself another cup of tea. “Just fucking spit it out. What do you want?”

 _‘Do what you want and deal with what happens next,’_ he thought distantly while his mouth went ahead and said,

“I kind of want to blow you right now,”

in an absentminded and incredibly nonchalant tone that clearly caught Levi so off-guard that he didn’t even register the content of Eren’s comment for a moment.

“That’s-” he started to say, and then stopped, eyes widening slightly.

Whatever Levi had been expecting him to say, it clearly wasn’t that.

He paused.

He blinked.

His eyebrows furrowed.

His mouth opened.

His mouth closed.

“Did you spend your entire childhood sniffing glue?”

“So you… don’t want a blowjob?” Eren ventured nervously, beginning to wonder if Levi had not meant his advice quite so literally.

Levi closed his eyes and made a bizarre chopping gesture with his hand that Eren couldn’t quite decipher the meaning of.

“I didn’t say that,” he said finally, and Eren grinned.

For some reason, the scowl he received in return only made him grin wider.

“Yeah,” Levi muttered so quietly that he almost missed it, “you’re going to fuck up a lot.”

Eren wasn’t sure what his words were meant to refer to, so he chose to ignore them.

***

He stared from Levi to the redheaded woman sitting at his table with a feeling of betrayal.

He’d gotten used to monopolizing Levi.

He didn’t like having his expectations disappointed.

This did not, of course, have anything to do with the fact that it had been two days and Levi still had not indulged his inexplicable urge to have a dick- a very _specific_ dick- in his mouth. Whenever Eren took matters into his own hands and began to make motions towards removing Levi’s from the confines of his pants, he discovered more completely just how adept at putting things off without refusing them altogether Levi seemed to be.

Rejection was something Eren could do. He understood what it meant to be told ‘no’ and he respected it.

An endless procession of ‘later, not right now’s and ‘have some fucking patience, you little shit’s, however, was not something Eren could do. It was driving him up the wall.

When he’d first expressed the desire, he had meant it in a fairly immediate sort of ‘I would really like to suck your dick the second we finish dinner, you don’t even need to get up, I’ll do the dishes if you let me’ sense, but the urge had turned out to be of the ‘while I would really have liked it if you’d taken me up on that initial dick sucking offer when it was given, it’s a standing offer and I will absolutely suck your dick right now if you let me’ variety, which was infinitely more frustrating because it just wasn’t going _away_ and he wanted to get it out of his system.

He had been intending to ask Levi to either tell him no or tell him when, precisely, this elusive perfect moment for getting a blowjob was going to occur, but then there she was.

Sitting at the table.

Smiling at him.

With reddish hair.

Dimly, he recognized that his frustrations had surpassed the usual level of what was considered acceptably irrational and that expressing them would very probably make him look slightly deranged, so he mustered a smile and attempted to seem normal.

“I don’t know you,” he greeted cheerfully before realizing that ‘I don’t know you’ wasn’t particularly high on the approved list of normal ways to greet strangers.

To her credit, she looked remarkably unfazed.

“You didn’t tell me you were expecting anyone, Levi,” she said warmly, shooting him a smile and Levi a narrow look.

Levi looked uncomfortable. “I wasn’t expecting you to visit.”

One of her thin eyebrows rose. Her dark eyes flickered to Eren’s face. “But you were expecting him?” Her secretive smile meant nothing to Eren, but it seemed to mean everything to Levi.

Eren coughed lightly into his fist. “I’m Eren,” he tried, extending a hand.

She took it with a sweet smile. “Petra Ral. I’m one of Levi’s students at the dojo.”

“I thought Levi didn’t have students,” he said without thinking. “Because he’s, uh, not good with people. Or something.”

He tried to ignore the stare Levi was burning into the side of his skull.

Petra just laughed. “Not technically, no- I’m Erwin’s student on paper, but I’ve been studying Levi’s techniques for two years now,” she clarified, at which point Eren realized she still hadn’t released his hand. “I just like to visit Levi once in a while. How do you know each other?”

The unspoken ‘he doesn’t get out much’ that punctuated her sentences seemed deafeningly loud, and if the way Levi was hunching into himself over by the counter was any indicator, he wasn’t especially pleased by it.

“I’m taking care of the house next door while its owners are on vacation,” he mumbled, gently pulling his hand free. She seemed surprised, as though she was just as startled and confused to find herself still holding his hand as he had been. “My dog likes his cat,” he added lamely.

“And digging up my goddamn lilies,” Levi muttered sullenly, settling his arms against the countertop like he’d decided to stay there.

He barely had the chance to formulate a retort before Petra’s eyes lit up in excitement.

“How often do you visit?”

‘How often does he let you visit?’ seemed to be what she was asking him, and he was thinking about lying even as he told the truth. “Every day?”

He suddenly realized that Levi’s focus was fixed on him, eyes wide and countenance threatening, and the second the words slipped from his lips, Levi closed his eyes and grimaced as though he was in pain.

Petra’s lips parted in surprise.

“Every day?” she pressed, leaning forward in her chair.

“No?” he denied, leaning back before realizing he could just step away. “Why are we talking about him like he’s not here?” he asked, bewildered.

Levi shot him a look and made cutting motion across his throat just as she glanced over at him.

He froze mid-gesture and her smile deepened from secretive to mischievous.

Eren almost fell over when she suddenly stood.

“I’ve taken up so much of your time already,” she commented sweetly, making an exaggerated show of looking at her watch and shooting Eren one last smile. “I should really get going. It was a pleasure to meet you, Eren!”

He hesitated to accept her offer of a handshake and found himself locked in a lingering hug instead.

Levi had his arms crossed over his chest and his gaze levelled forward. Eren wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean.

He patted Petra’s back lightly as the hug continued without any sign of ending. “Yeah, it was nice to, uh-” He glanced at Levi for assistance. Levi looked away impassively. “It was to meet you too.”

Finally, her arms loosened from around him and she stepped away, shooting her beaming smile over at Levi instead.

The meaning behind his body language suddenly became very obvious.

‘Don’t hug me,’ it insisted, ‘don’t even think about it.’

Petra looked like she was thinking about it.

Eren wondered if hugging Levi was something she thought about doing often.

In the end, she didn’t, in fact, try to hug Levi, and Eren saw his shoulders sag with relief when he closed the door behind her.

“She seems nice,” he ventured.

Levi threw him a weary look. “She is.”

“So are you and her…?” He gestured evocatively.

Levi just stared at him like he’d started speaking in tongues.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loans come due.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally earned my rating.

“If you don’t not want me to blow you, then why won’t you just let me blow you?”

Payment came due the day he made the mistake of confronting Levi about the whole blowjob situation, which just so happened to be the _next_ day, because while Eren was many things, patient was not one of them.

“You really have no idea why I find the idea of you sucking my dick so fucking weird, do you?” Levi asked him incredulously, and if Eren had been better at recognizing the sort of conversations that typically followed the words ‘you really have no idea why I’ in any situation, he may have been better equipped to avoid his from turning into one.

“No,” he insisted, exasperated. “No, I really do not know why you find the idea of me sucking your dick so fucking weird, so tell me, Levi, _please_ : why is the idea of me sucking your dick weird?”

It was at that moment that he saw something in Levi’s expression that made him second-guess the wisdom of what he’d asked, but it was already too late.

“You’re a good-looking kid, Eren, I won’t deny that,” he started, and Eren threw up his hands.

“Really not helping me understand why you don’t want me to suck your dick, Levi,” he pointed out.

“At this point, I’m half-tempted to let you _just to shut you up,_ ” Levi snapped. “You want to know? You really want to know? Then shut the fuck up and listen.”

Eren shut up, crossing his arms over his chest and rolling his eyes.

“You lost me somewhere between ‘we’re not like that’ and ‘let me suck your dick, Levi’,” he told Eren harshly. “I don’t know what the fuck kind of free love hippie commune you crawled out of, but around here we reserve that shit for when we stop being friends and start being something else, so I’m struggling with the idea of a friendly suck of the dick. Making out and dry humping each other like idiots through our clothes?” He raised a hand and gestured vaguely, looking mildly perturbed. “That’s still fucking weird, but I can do that. As soon as you start having to clean up and get dressed after you screw around, though, that’s not something I can write off as friendly. There’s a certain amount of intimacy and trust that comes with sticking your dick in someone’s mouth.”

Eren’s face was burning.

He wanted to protest, but his mouth couldn’t find the words.

Levi looked at him wearily. “Do you suck your friends’ dicks on a regular basis?” he probed, visibly bewildered. “How many of your friends have you fucking blown?”

Eren barely managed a mortified squawk.

“That’s either none of them or all of them, and I do need to know which it is, Eren.”

“None of them,” he croaked and then swallowed, ducking his head. “No, I don’t- I’ve never, not with-”

“So why do you want to suck mine, then?” Levi pushed, leaning against the wall.

“You’re hot?” It wasn’t supposed to be a question.

Levi’s eyebrows shot up. “Putting aside your shitty taste, if you saw a hot guy on the street who looked like he might be up for it, would you suck his dick?”

“No!” Eren protested, cutting off Levi’s ‘why?’ with a, “I don’t even know him!”

Levi snorted. “You get his attention, he talks to you for a bit, you end up spending the afternoon together in, I don’t know, a fucking café or someshit because we’re not entering alcohol into the equation here. _Now_ do you suck his dick?”

“No!” Eren denied again, “It’s not-”

“Why? Why do you want to suck my dick and not his? What’s the difference?”

“Because you’re _you_ ,” Eren blurted out. “And he’s not you,” he mumbled, already wishing he could swallow his words.

Levi leaned forward expectantly and then slumped back against the wall, eyes rolling skyward.

“Why do I bother?” he muttered, apparently to no one. “I’ve grown tomatoes smarter than you.”

“Why _do_ you bother?” Eren snapped defensively.

Levi just shot him a puzzled look. “Because I like you, you little shit, I thought that was obvious.”

And abruptly, it was.

Everything he’d been avoiding thinking about fell on him at once.

“Oh my god,” he breathed, “this is what Armin was worried about.”

Levi just laughed, the bastard.

***

Eren had mixed feelings about coming out of their conversation as the one who had to make up his mind about something.

It wasn’t how he’d expected things to go.

He didn’t want to think about all the things making that decision demanded he think about.

 _‘I just want to suck his dick,’_ he thought petulantly for what felt like the thousandth time. _‘Why is he making this so complicated?’_

He knew the answer already- because Levi was the sort of person who understood sexual intimacy as something exclusive to relationships he considered distinct from that of simple friendship- but he kept asking himself the question in the hopes that the answer would change.

He wasn’t _opposed_ to the idea of being something more with Levi.

He didn’t _dislike_ the idea.

It just _terrified_ him.

“Do I want to go to school here because it’s a good idea or because Levi’s here?” he mumbled to himself as he lay sprawled out on the couch and stared at the ceiling, which just happened to have been what he’d been doing since he woke up that morning.

In the thick heat of the afternoon, he found himself dozing off in snatches, and every single one of them saw his mind preoccupied with a hazy half-dream about getting up from the couch, wandering out the front door, and turning to find Levi’s house gone.

He’d woken to the image so many times over the course of the morning and early afternoon that he was irrationally afraid he’d look out the window to find an empty lot next door.

So he continued to stare at the ceiling.

He wanted to feel upset that Levi hadn’t come to fetch him when he’d failed to show up on his doorstep in the morning like he usually did, but he wasn’t quite able to delude himself into thinking that would make any sense following their confrontation.

He threw an arm over his eyes.

“Do I,” he repeated more clearly, like the walls could answer him, “want to go to school here because it’s a good idea or because Levi’s here?” The silence was deafening. He spoke without any idea of what it was he wanted to say, just a feeling that it needed to be broken.

“If I want…” He swallowed conflicting words. The silence rushed in. “If I want this- with Levi- and I go somewhere else,” he mused, and then flinched. The idea of admitting that he felt more seriously about Levi than he’d wanted to and then leaving was a painful prospect.

The idea of leaving at all was beginning to seem like a painful prospect.

He didn’t like what that meant.

“I can’t go to school here just because I want to suck a guy’s dick,” he groused.

He could, in fact, go to school there simply because he wanted to suck a guy’s dick.

“It’d be a stupid decision, though.”

It would.

His arm was heavy and warm over his eyes, but he couldn’t muster the energy to move it. “It’s a really good school,” he mumbled, trying to justify his decision to himself.

It was, in fact, a very good school- one that he had been very seriously considering going to long before strange neighbours and their genitals came into the equation.

_‘But it has to be one or the other.’_

“But it has to be one or the other,” he repeated aloud, trying to decide why something about the words sounded wrong. “Do I want to stay for Levi or because it’s a really good school?”

Something wet and cold touched his hand.

He jerked it away, sitting up sharply with a low noise of alarm before realizing that Cheddar was standing beside the couch and the wetness he had felt had been her nose pressing into his limp palm.

He patted her with a sigh, scratching behind her ears obligingly.

When something else touched him slightly on the shoulder, he didn’t jump- he froze, turning slowly to meet the bored eyes of Duchess where she’d taken up residence on the back of his couch.

She had her paw outstretched and placed imperiously on him, and when he looked at her, she placed it squarely on his cheek with a look of boredom.

He was about to say something when Cheddar started licking his hand.

“Augh,” he grunted, whipping it back into his lap. “God, go away, _both_ of you-”

Duchess stared at him, unperturbed, lifted her paw, and placed it on his nose.

Cheddar leaned her nose on his thigh and stared at the side of his face imploringly.

He barely even noticed.

“Both,” he muttered, distracted. “It’s both, of course it’s fucking _both_.”

He startled Duchess and sent Cheddar scampering excitedly after him when he bolted up from the couch and bounded out the door.

Mercifully, Levi’s house had not disappeared in the handful of hours he’d spent moping, and it was only when he’d already tested the doorknob and found it unlocked that he realized he’d completely forgotten to put on shoes.

He decided that he didn’t care.

For the moment he spent hesitating, confused by the shoes he wasn’t wearing and therefore didn’t have to take off, he heard something.

Except for the occasional music playing in the kitchen- always at a very reasonable volume, despite his earlier assessments- the methodical click of a knife against a cutting board or the low sizzle of frying vegetables, Levi’s house was always quiet, and sound carried through the narrow hallways and small rooms with a certain clarity that was lost and deadened in the wide spaces of Eren’s temporary home.

In that silence, he heard a soft grunt, and while he wasn’t normally inclined to be stealthy, something about it inspired him to creep.

He crept to the kitchen and found it empty.

He eyed the stairs he’d never been up, passed the spotless bathroom, and peered into the living room.

Watching Levi make a training video from the doorway to the room rather than from across the street or in snatches online was a different beast entirely.

He watched the fluid extensions and contractions of his back muscles without thinking to move until Levi began to turn in his direction, and even then, he darted back into the safety of the hall uncertain if he’d been spotted.

He stood there, fixed to that spot for what felt like an eternity, just listening to the soft grunts and hisses trickling out of the living room and marvelling at the barely audible sound of Levi’s movements.

With his hand clutched against his chest and his heart racing under it, he felt a thousand times louder and more conspicuous in his stillness than Levi was in his flurried activity.

“I could still go home,” he whispered without meaning or wanting to, and flinched, expecting Levi to be there and somehow have heard for a moment.

When it became obvious that he wasn’t and hadn’t, he dropped his head against the wall, exhaling deeply.

“Oh,” someone said from beside him, and he sucked in a sharp breath, almost losing balance as he hurried to straighten out of his sagging posture.

“Hi,” he said nervously.

Levi’s expression was a careful sort of impassive. “You didn’t knock.”

“You door was unlocked,” he faltered, trying to keep his eyes fixed on Levi’s face and not on the bare and lightly gleaming expense of skin below it.

Levi just hummed expectantly.

Eren’s mouth felt very dry.

The moment stretched between them until Levi sighed, dropped his eyes to the side, and turned away.

Eren grabbed his arm, desperate to say something, _anything_.

“I’m staying,” he croaked, suddenly embarrassed and unsure. “If you want me to?”

Levi just sighed more heavily.

“The whole point was to make up your own goddamn mind, Eren,” he murmured quietly. He didn’t make any motion to leave.

Eren hoped that was a good sign.

He licked his lips nervously. “No, I’m coming to school here anyway,” he insisted, trying to sound surer of himself than he felt, “I just-”

Levi was watching his face quietly, face unreadable.

Eren let his fingertips curl back over the cool skin of his forearm, almost wishing he was wearing a shirt with sleeves he could cling to like the desperately annoying child he felt like.

“I just want both,” he mumbled, unable to find the right words.

Levi looked amused. “So that’s your decision?”

“Yeah.”

Levi looked like he was expecting something again, so Eren kissed him, hoping that, for once in his life, he had interpreted the situation correctly.

He had.

***

Levi’s fingers carding through his hair and scratching convulsively across his scalp when he did something right were a welcome distraction from the vaguely uncomfortable and primarily vicariously gratifying experience of getting exactly what he’d wanted.

It wasn’t that he was disappointed with the experience- he’d just forgotten the decidedly unglamorous quirks of sucking a dick.

Levi was a short but thickly built person, and Eren had been uncommonly pleased to find that description extended to other things than his stature.

He wasn’t particularly worried about gagging himself like the overeager and inexperienced teenager Levi inadvertently made him feel like, but he’d forgotten he couldn’t unhinge his jaw like a snake, so the extended strain of keeping his jaw cracked open wide enough to ensure his teeth were safely clear of Levi’s dick was beginning to take its toll.

No matter the circumstances, giving a blowjob just wasn’t the most elegant or comfortable act in the world.

 _‘Worth it,’_ he thought, eying Levi’s face as he squeezed the base of Levi’s erection and twisted his palm up it in tandem with the motions of his bobbing head.

Levi was a quiet partner- he’d picked up on that fact from their brief and explosive grinding and groping sessions. He tended to pant rather than moan- the sounds he made stuck deep in this throat or high in his chest and vibrated there.

He made faces like he was in pain, screwing up his eyebrows and tucking his head to his chest. It was not an especially flattering pose viewed from below.

Objectively, Eren knew Levi’s expressions looked ridiculous because everyone getting their dick sucked looked ridiculous from a dick-sucking vantage point.

He also knew that he was seeing everything through the rosy goggles of fresh and violent infatuation, because somehow, he still looked like the most desirable thing he’d even seen, and even the way he kept disentangling his fingers from Eren’s hair to pat awkwardly at it like he wasn’t sure what to do with his hands was too endearing to bear.

Eren sucked hard on the tip for a moment, breaking his suction with a smile when Levi hissed in a breath.

“Eren,” he groaned quietly, tone urgent and soothing fingers dissolving into a clumsy fluttering motion in his hair before gripping lightly and staying there.

He both appreciated and regretted the condom when Levi’s erection pulsed on his tongue- he did not mourn the bitter tang he was missing, but the latex felt and tasted strange and disappointing compared to the soft skin he’d had in mind.

Levi had insisted, and he was not about to surrender his urge over something so trivial, not when he was so close.

His jaw ached as soon as he pulled off, and he took a moment to roll it left and right, grimacing when one side let out a small wet pop.

It must have been audible in the quiet room, because Levi snorted breathlessly at him, slumped against the headboard with his eyes closed and his hand heavy on Eren’s head.

Eren lay his cheek on Levi’s thigh on pure impulse and just stayed there for a few long moments, looking up at the fading colour in his neighbour’s cheeks and marvelling at the uneven tips of his long eyelashes.

When Levi began to stroke his hair again, this time more gently and with greater precision, he closed his eyes and smiled, letting the motion soothe him.

After the stress of the day, drowsiness fell on him like a warm blanket in a cool, dark room.

“Don’t fall asleep on me,” Levi warned, one eye cracked open a slit, “I need to clean up.”

Eren smiled, closed his eyes, and drifted off, at least a little bit because he’d been told not to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That may have been the goofiest blowjob I've ever written.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All manner of shit happens, as is the way of things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the random and unprompted update. This story is largely marked complete because I have no idea if I'm going to consistently continue it or not- it's just sort of happening. 
> 
> Anyway, have some awkward meet-the-friends shit.

Their relationship didn’t change significantly after that.

Then again, it did.

They still weren’t an official _something_ \- at least, not that he was aware of, though he may have been inclined to suspect Levi of being the sort of person who was prone to forming assumptions without seeking confirmation of them if he himself had been the sort of person prone to thinking about such things- and the things they were learning about each other meant that their interactions did not seem to be changing to any great degree.

It had quickly become obvious to Eren that Levi, while easily coaxed into bouts of low-effort kissing and fondling, had not only a significantly lower libido than he did, but also had absolutely no problem saying ‘no’ to Eren’s advances when it became obvious that they all reflected standing offers.

Gone were the ‘later, not right now’s and ‘have some fucking patience, you little shit’s the instant Levi realized rebuffing Eren’s propositions wasn’t going to make him with withdraw them.

“ _Levi_ ,” he’d breathe seductively, sidling up behind him hopefully as he washed herbs in the sink.

“No,” Levi’d reply instantly, and that was that.

He was frustrated, but he knew better than to push, and it had taken him all of a day for him to learn better than to whine.

“You sound like your dog when you do that,” Levi had remarked, his stare flat and unimpressed. “Don’t make me tie you up outside, too.”

He must have made a strange expression in response, because Levi’s eyes had widened and he’d leaned away, expression turning wary.

“No,” he’d said again, more sternly, and while Eren didn’t know what he was saying ‘no’ to, he knew better than to press the issue.

But he was _so_ frustrated.

He didn’t even try to deny Levi’s offhand comments about the similarities between pet and owner- he knew he spent more time than was probably acceptable dogging Levi’s heels and worming his way into Levi’s space to satisfy his most basic cravings for touch, and he didn’t have to reflect on it to feel relieved that Levi didn’t seem to mind his neediness.

He was frustrated, persistent, and frequently overeager. Levi was awkward, frank, and absolutely pitiless.

Nothing much had changed.

Then again, it had.

It had only been three days when he woke up to a ringing cellphone.

He felt an instant surge of guilt in response- he’d been putting off calling Armin because he knew that even if he tried to lie about what had happened, Armin would know. If he tried to hide it, Armin would ask, and then Armin would know.

No matter what transpired in their conversation, Armin would know.

Armin probably already knew, precisely because Eren had been putting off calling him.

He fumbled it from his bedside table and pressed it to his ear with a groggy, “hey.”

“ _Eren_.”

He hadn’t realized he was still half-asleep until her voice hit him like a splash of cold water to the face.

“Mikasa,” he acknowledged, surprised. “Hey. Sorry I didn’t call, I’ve been-”

If Levi spoke with the kind of quiet but resonant presence that made his words cut through silence and sound with equal force, Mikasa spoke with the kind of soft but deliberate presence that made her words nigh-impossible to ignore- and completely impossible to interrupt.

“ _Eren_ ,” she repeated, voice even but tight. He shut up. “ _I spoke to Armin last night._ ”

He sucked in a breath through his teeth, unsure of why he felt nervous. “Yeah?”

“ _Yeah_ ,” she said softly, and then said nothing.

Anxiety built in his stomach.

He abruptly remembered why he’d always called Armin instead of Mikasa.

Armin’s frustration, disappointment, or irritation was always either self-evident or openly expressed. Armin called attention to problems and addressed them diplomatically. He had been born with a predisposition to negotiation but had become a true negotiator through a lifetime of experience.

Experience with them.

Mikasa’s feelings, no matter what they were, were obvious but never expressed. Mikasa called attention to problems by fostering an atmosphere of anticipation. She accused without accusing and waited in stony silence until her opponent began addressing everything they felt they may have done wrong- it was a method that often brought to light more problems than it solved.

Eren loved his adopted sister, but Armin had always been the one to soothe the raw feelings their conflicting personalities caused in times of stress.

He wasn’t sure what the problem was, and without Armin to spell it out for him, he was already growing defensive and irritable. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, trying to calm himself and only calling to mind Armin’s long-suffering sigh. It didn’t help.

“I don’t know what you want me to say, Mikasa,” he ventured carefully, absentmindedly kicking the smothering covers off of his legs and over the end of the bed.

She was silent.

He bit back an aggravated sigh. “I’m serious, I don’t know what I did.”

“ _He’s thirty-four, Eren._ ”

He blinked, staring up at the ceiling for a moment before furrowing his eyebrows and rolling onto his side. “So?” The floor was cold on his feet. It felt nice.

“ _So he’s thirty-four, Eren._ ”

“You’re going to have to give me more than that,” he yawned. Standing made him uncomfortably aware of the fullness of his bladder.

“ _Thirty-four is too old for you. You’re twenty._ ”

The walk to the bathroom had never seemed so long. “Mikasa, we’re not-”

“ _I don’t believe you._ ”

He frowned as he pinned the phone between his shoulder and his ear to fumble himself out of his pyjama pants. “Even if we are,” he muttered, “it’s none of your business. I’m twenty, Mikasa, I don’t need you to baby me.”

“ _I’m older than you._ ”

“By like a _month_ ,” he complained, sighing as the pressure in his abdomen abated with a suddenness that was simultaneously pleasurable and slightly painful. “You don’t do this to Armin,” he pointed out, shaking off and tucking himself back into his pants.

“ _Armin doesn’t make stupid decisions like you do,_ ” she rebutted calmly, and he grimaced, wishing the roar of the tap had drowned her out. His neck was starting to ache from holding the phone in place.

“What makes you think I’m making a stupid decision?” he challenged.

“ _You’re going to go to school there for a reason you shouldn’t._ ”

“It’s a good school.” He knew he was being defensive, but the resurgence of anxiety her words evoked was unwelcome. “I probably would’ve gone there anyway.”

He knew instantly that it was the wrong thing to say.

“ _Probably isn’t definitely, Eren._ ” There was a menace in her tone he didn’t like.

“Okay, I definitely would’ve gone there anyway,” he said flippantly, drying his hands on his pants and hastily switching the phone from one ear to the other. It was too late- he already had a kink in his neck. “Happy now?”

She just hummed warningly.

“Mikasa, you said you didn’t have a problem with me going to a different school as you,” he groaned. “You even told me that I should housesit for these people so I could get a feel for the area! How is this different? Why can’t you just trust me?”

“ _He’s going to distract you. I’m not going to let some horny old man ruin your only chance at becoming a musician, Eren._ ”

“He’s not horny, you don’t have to worry about that,” he grumbled absentmindedly, wandering into the kitchen. Cheddar greeted him with perked ears and a loping approach. He scolded her quietly as she made to jump on him.

In the meantime, Mikasa made a disgusted noise in his ear. He grinned.

“Besides,” he dismissed, “my life isn’t going to end even if this does goes south. College isn’t necessarily going to give me that much of a better chance at becoming a musician- lots of people get famous without going to school for it.” He could feel her gearing up to reproach him and had a moment of inspiration. “I’m going to fuck up sooner or later, Mikasa, and I’m going to do it regardless of whether or not I mean to, so you might as well just fucking relax.”

He felt very clever as he peered through the kitchen window in an attempt to get a glimpse of the old man in question.

Mikasa’s voice sounded very odd when she responded. “ _Eren, what did you say this guy’s name was?_ ”

He didn’t notice.

There was a strange man standing in front of Levi’s porch. Even from where he was sitting on the porch, Eren could see that Levi looked uncomfortable.

His face was smooth and closed-off, but his eyes kept darting surreptitiously towards Eren’s front door, and judging by the way the stranger’s eyes flickered curiously in the same direction, he’d noticed.

“I’ll call you back,” he murmured absently into the receiver, ignoring her protests.

The air seemed very warm and still when he pulled the phone from his ear- still and muffled, like it was stifling all but the most immediate of sounds.

He crept out of his front door without thinking about the wisdom of the action, phone still clutched in his hand.

Levi’s eyes widened. He jerked his head in a motion Eren did not immediately recognize as an order to go back inside.

It would not have mattered if he had, anyway- in the very same instant, the stranger who was lingering in front of his porch locked eyes with him and smiled.

“Are you Eren?” he called, and Eren twitched, startled by the piercing strength of his voice- his words couldn’t have sounded clearer if he’d been standing next to him instead of next door.

“Yeah,” he called back, glancing down at his phone to make sure he’d already hung up. “Who’s asking?”

The man seemed to cross the yard in too few strides to be possible despite his unhurried air. As he came closer, Eren realized a number of things.

One was that this man was very tall- he stood head-and-shoulders over him, casting a long shadow in the morning light.

Another was that this man was very handsome in a very polished, factory-made sort of way- he seemed like an exercise in calculated symmetry, all clean angles and freshly shaven cheeks and bright blue eyes.

Another still was that his disarming smile and leisurely posture were at odds with the impression he was making- he stood just a little too close, still far enough away to be accidental, but Eren felt an instantaneous and purely instinctual surge of unease.

Despite his appearance of polite interest, something about him gave Eren the feeling that he was curious- intensely so.

“Erwin Smith,” he introduced warmly, extending a hand.

The calculated nature of the motion nagged at Eren for reasons he couldn’t quite explain- if he had been a more observant and thoughtful person, he may have realized that it was because the hand had quite pointedly been extended far enough forwards to be welcoming, but not so far as to be aggressive.

It took him longer than it may have otherwise to catch up with his own thoughts, and he had the uncomfortable suspicion that Erwin had learned a lot about him in that split-second he spent staring openly at his hand before taking it.

“You work at Levi’s dojo, don’t you? Petra mentioned you,” he recalled.

Erwin’s smile widened. “I do,” he confirmed, for all appearances quite pleased that he had been recognized. “I run the dojo. Petra’s one of our brightest students. You should see her practice sometime.”

Eren realized that Erwin was still holding his hand in a firm grip, just as Petra had.

“I’d like that,” he said politely. “I mean, I’ve seen Levi practice, and I used to time my sister, but it’s always interesting to see different people’s, uh-” He lost the word, and he was fairly certain Erwin knew, but help did not seem to be forthcoming. “Techniques,” he finished lamely.

Erwin was still holding his hand.

 _‘What the hell is with these people?’_ he puzzled, pulling gently against his hold to test if he’d let go.

He did not. He didn’t even show any sign of noticing that he was still holding Eren’s hand. “I might have guessed you’d seen Levi practicing,” he chuckled. “You visit him often, don’t you?”

It sounded like a question, but he had an odd feeling that it wasn’t one. “I can see him through my windows, too,” he evaded, realizing after he said it how strange it had to sound. “Because we’re neighbours, I mean.”

Erwin squeezed his hand companionably, finally letting go. Eren wiped his palm on his pants covertly, not because it was sweaty, but because it should have been and he was slightly disconcerted by the fact that it was not. It seemed unnatural. _‘Is this guy a robot?’_ His suit was entirely too heavy for the hot, humid weather, too.

Erwin chuckled again.

Eren suddenly had the most bizarre fear that he could read minds.

“It doesn’t look like Levi intends to join us, so I suppose we’ll have to go to him,” Erwin mused, shooting him a conspiratorial smile as he turned away.

Eren considered himself a fairly leggy individual- he wasn’t short, and he tended to walk with purposeful quickness, but he found himself jogging to keep up with Erwin’s deceptively casual strides.

He nearly tripped over his own feet backtracking when Erwin stopped, leaving him to hurry past him before realizing his mistake.

Levi was sitting in his chair as usual, a cup of tea in one hand and Duchess by his feet, but his slumped posture and beleaguered aspect were anything but usual.

If Eren had thought Levi had looked like a child caught in an act of mischief when he’d called him out on not knowing his age, that image was completely overridden by the one he found himself presented with.

His look of feigned disinterest so poorly masked the mixture of anxiety, irritation, guilt, and sullen resignation he was feeling that he looked, in that moment, like an unruly child who’d had his parents called in for a dreaded ‘little chat’ by the school principal.

‘Just let this be over,’ his beaten look seemed to beg, ‘please, just get this over with.’

Erwin’s hand was heavy and unexpected on his shoulder. He looked over to find him smiling down at him like they were old friends.

“An old friend of ours is coming back from overseas for a couple of weeks,” he said amiably, and if Eren had been Armin, he would’ve thought, _‘aha, we’ve finally gotten to the point,’_ but he was not Armin, so he took in the information with only the slightest sense that something was amiss.

He could see Levi grimacing silently out of the corner of his eye, but it was very difficult to break away from the piercing stare of his friend and co-worker.

“They’ve invited us to their cottage for a weekend- I thought it was only fair to extend the invitation to you, since you and Levi have become so close.”

He tried to mull the words over, looking for the source of his apprehension, but Erwin’s presence seemed to demand an immediate answer.

“I’m housesitting,” he deflected belatedly, “I don’t think I’m allowed to leave the house unattended.”

Erwin laughed in a way that reminded him strangely of a school principal again. “I’m sure they’ve left their home empty for a weekend before. If it’s robbers or vandals you’re worried about, I can assure you this is a very safe neighbourhood,” he coaxed. “It’s been a hot summer, hasn’t it? I’m sure you-” his eyes flickered up to Eren’s window, crinkling with amusement “-and your dog could use some time on the lake to cool down.”

The idea had an enormous amount of appeal. He knew, on some level, that he was being coerced with promises of cool water and the unspoken but insinuative promise of beer that he'd been taught to expect came part-and-parcel with weekends at lakeside cottages, but the knowing didn’t make the coercion sound any less sweet to his ears.

“I don’t want to impose,” he said reluctantly, struck by the possibility that Levi didn’t want him to come.

He snuck a glance in his direction and found Levi looking at him with an exhausted expression of utter defeat.

Erwin squeezed his shoulder reassuringly, laughing again.

“Eren, please trust me when I say,” he smiled, “that you could not be more welcome.”

***

Erwin was a purposeful lingerer, the kind of person who insisted on seeing to the finalization of every last detail before he left his interests in the hands of others.

Only after he left did Eren realize that he’d essentially left them with no chance to change their minds- it was as though he’d coaxed them into planning and paying for a wedding only days after their engagement.

Attempting to cancel seemed like something that would only be met with grueling amounts of resistance.

If Levi’s expression was anything to go by, that was precisely the position Eren had put them in.

He was still surprised by the sudden impact of Levi’s elbow against his gut- it didn’t hurt enormously, though he was sure he’d have a hell of a bruise later, but the air left him in a rush.

He had to kneel on the floor to recover himself, gasping painfully as he held his stomach.

“Sorry,” Levi muttered after a second, and Eren shot him an incredulous look.

“If you- why did you-” he wheezed, too breathless to speak without exhausting himself.

Levi shifted from foot to foot, looking away indifferently. “I wasn’t apologizing for hitting you,” he mumbled, “you deserved that. The ‘sorry’ is because you don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into.” He paused awkwardly. “Sorry.”

Eren settled back into a sitting position, trying to even out his breathing. “What?”

Levi’s lips flattened, and for the first time in their acquaintance, he looked exactly as old as Eren knew him to be. Eren stared at him as he dropped into a squat beside him.

The silence seemed to stretch on endlessly between them.

“Hanji’s the one I was talking to,” Levi said suddenly.

“What?” Eren asked him again, feeling lost.

“Hanji,” Levi repeated insistently, eyebrows furrowing, “they’re the person I told about you.”

He squinted. “Huh?”

Levi was starting to look more annoyed than contrite. “You asked me who I was talking to about you when I asked how old you were,” he explained impatiently, “it was Hanji. I was talking to Hanji.”

The pieces clicked together with an unwieldy lurch. “Oh,” he said blankly, and then, “ _oh_. You were talking to him in the middle of the night because of, like, time zones and shit,” he deduced triumphantly, feeling very clever.

“They,” Levi said curtly, cutting off his confused ‘what?’ with a, “Hanji goes by ‘they’ and if you call them anything else, you’re inviting more material on the subject than a gender studies student could fit in their final thesis.” His stare was flat and unsympathetic. “By the end of the weekend you won’t know what you are or what pronouns to use for strangers, and I won’t fucking save you. It’ll have been your own fault.”

He just blinked, slightly baffled.

“So… what _are_ they, then?” he ventured cautiously. “Like… in terms of gender stuff.”

“They’re Hanji,” Levi told him, like that explained everything, which he’d later come to discover it did.

“And why did you punch me? I still don’t really get what your problem is with this,” he admitted, leaning back on his hands and stretching out his legs. Levi’s unfaltering squat was starting to make his legs ache sympathetically. “If you don’t want to go, then you could’ve just said so.”

Something indecisive flickered over his features. “It’s not that I don’t want to go,” he started to protest, and then sighed, leaning his elbows on his knees like he was sitting in a chair and not holding an uncomfortable position with what looked like next to no effort. “I wasn’t expecting anything else to happen between us or for Hanji to come back when I told them about you.”

Eren felt the beginnings of a sly grin coming on, and he encouraged it, mostly to disguise the odd feeling of nauseous dread forming in his gut. “So are you in some sort of open relationship with them, or…?”

Levi’s look of abject horror told him everything he needed to know about that.

He rolled his eyes. “Look, I don’t mind playing twenty questions with your friends,” he assured.

“More like two hundred.”

“Huh?”

“Questions. More like two hundred questions,” Levi told him seriously, “or two thousand. They’re going to ask you some really fucking weird, personal questions.”

He smiled, albeit a little tentatively. “So they’re going to try and shock me to test how much I can take, is that what you’re saying?”

“No.” Eren jerked back a little, surprised by his vehemence. “Hanji sleeps maybe three to five hours a night and never seems to get tired, especially not when they’re being a noisy, meddlesome four-eyed shit-for-brains about other people’s personal lives,” he replied with a hunted expression. He looked like a cornered animal. Eren was starting to suspect there was more to the situation than he was aware of. “They’re going to ask you questions, and if you answer them, they’re going to keep asking you questions until you tell them outright to stop, and then they’re just going to eavesdrop on your conversations instead.”

“So,” he murmured uncomfortably, “why are you friends with this person?”

Levi laughed mirthlessly. “They learned fucking quick not to do that shit to me, Eren. We’ve known each other for a long-ass time.” He leaned forward, dropping lower to balance himself. “There are a lot of things Hanji wants to know about me but knows better than to ask.” He paused and frowned. “You’re the first person I’ve had-” he seemed to struggle with words for a moment “-this sort of relationship with that Hanji will have met.”

Levi’s intensity was making him nervous, but the situation still seemed a little ridiculous. “So you’re saying they’re going to ask me,” he said. “What am I going to know after a month or two that they’re not already going to know after however many fucking years you’ve known each other? What you look like when you’re horny? The sort of things you say when I’m blowing you?”

“Yes,” Levi answered immediately.

“You can’t be serious,” he protested, but it was more reflexive than anything, because he could see in it Levi’s face.

He was completely serious.

“Don’t fucking answer their questions, Eren. Not a fucking word or I’ll beat the everloving shit out of you, I swear to god.” There was something intensely unnerving about how wide and focused his pale eyes were. “Please.”

“Okay,” he agreed. “Not a word.”

For some reason, Levi didn’t look especially comforted.

***

His first encounter with Hanji Zoë was not at all what he’d expected.

He stepped out of Levi’s car after a long, hot drive that had been rife with sexual tension and nervous tension alike from beginning to end, and found them already waiting on the deck in front of the door to the cottage when he looked up.

“Levi,” they greeted fondly, and then froze, nearly falling down the stairs in the process.

He suddenly understood Levi’s apprehensions.

They were clinging, spiderlike, to the banisters, staring at him with wide eyes, eerily magnified by the thick lenses of their glasses.

“You’re Eren?” they breathed.

“Uh,” he answered, lifting a hand cautiously. “Yeah. Hi. Hanji, right?”

They didn’t appear to have heard him. “You’re Eren,” they repeated, more than a little disbelievingly.

On the other side of the car, Levi muttered an exasperated curse.

They moved faster than he was entirely comfortable with- at first, he thought they really were falling down the stairs.

The general impression they gave of being propelled by some unrestrained momentum contained within their gangly body rather than by any sort of conscious choice to do so was only reinforced by the way they half-fell, half-ran down the stairs towards him.

He stepped back automatically, convinced they’d crash into him.

He froze when they grabbed his cheeks in their palms and leaned in like a lover seeking a kiss, staring wide-eyed.

They turned their head in sharp, birdlike movements, shooting Levi an unreadable look over the car, craning their neck to look over their shoulder at an unseen figure he could only assume was Erwin, and snapping forward to stare at him again.

“You’re Eren?” they asked again, face as unreadable as Levi’s often was- not for a lack of emotion, but a superfluity of it. There were too many emotions for him to decide which one they seemed to be feeling.

“Yeah,” he mumbled as best he could with his face trapped in their hands.

He could hear Levi shuffling uncomfortably on the other side of the car in the silence that followed.

“Is he paying you?” Hanji asked out of nowhere, tone urgent, and Levi squawked indignantly.

“What?” He was baffled. Levi’s warning seemed less and less overwrought by the second.

“He must be paying you,” they insisted, cocking their head to the side like a crow examining a fallen ring. “You’re too young and good-looking for a foul-mouthed old shrimp like him. Did he promise to pay your school debts? Do you have expensive taste? Does he keep you locked in his wine cellar?”

“Wha- no! Jesus-” He could hear Levi muttering ‘fuck _off_ , Hanji’ under his breath. “He’s not paying me,” he snapped, shoving their hands off of his face and rubbing uncomfortably at the faint and peculiar-smelling dampness their absence left behind. “I fucking started it, so- yeah,” he shot. “Wait, Levi has a wine cellar?”

He knew he was more puzzled and irritated than he had a right to be- he’d been warned. The warning just didn’t do the reality justice.

Hanji continued to stare at him, apparently unperturbed by his response.

Their head whipped to the side suddenly, eyes fixing on Levi.

“Do you have a ten-inch dick or something?”

If he’d been less flustered by the question, he might’ve found it telling that Levi only responded to it with the same sort of weary sigh he reserved for Eren’s worst moments of childishness.

Mercifully, that was the moment that Levi chose to let Cheddar- who’d been terribly behaved the entire ride up, much to Eren’s chagrin and Levi’s aggravation- out of the backseat of the car, and she bounded out and began loping back and forth across the gravel and grass, still dashing forward as she tried to sniff things and looping back to continue the job, only to be distracted by something else.

“ _Puppy_ ,” Hanji said in a low, unnerving voice.

“I hope it’s okay that I,” he started, trailing off into a half-mumbled, “brought her.”

Hanji had walked three very purposeful steps towards the dog, squatted on the spot, and silently extended their arms like a parent demanding a hug from a child.

The most bizarre thing, at least in his mind, was that Cheddar had immediately stopped sniffing everything in sight to look and then dash forward, jumping up to place her paws on Hanji’s shoulders.

“Dogs are always welcome, Eren,” Hanji whispered, scratching the dog in question behind the ears.

He stared.

Levi snorted at Eren’s dumbfounded look and rapped his knuckles against the hood of the car to get his attention. “Congratulations, you’ve got a new dogsitter,” he drawled, hoisting Duchess’ carrier out of the backseat of the car. “Now help me bring some of this shit in while Hanji’s distracted.”

He took the bags Levi threw at him and followed him up the stairs to the cottage with an odd feeling of numbness.

“We’ll have to clean in here,” Levi groused, “shiteyes out there can’t remember to keep themself clean, let alone a fucking house.”

Eren said nothing.

He watched Levi let Duchess out into the living room, staring blankly at her as she stretched leisurely and began to explore the area.

“I really did not know what I was getting myself into,” he admitted, dropping his bags onto one of the couches somewhat listlessly.

Levi snorted again, mumbling another, “sorry.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Conversational slip-ups with friends who never let you live a goddamn thing down, the joys of pet ownership, and Eren is irresponsible. 
> 
> Don't be like Eren.
> 
> (Contains explicit content. Slightly less goofy this time, I swear.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, because apparently this is a thing people do- you can also find me on tumblr [here](http://brodingershat.tumblr.com). I track my AO3 username and Fic: Paper Boy. Shoot me a line, tag me in a post entirely devoted to yelling at me for writing goofy AUs, do whatever.

“So what’s he _like?_ ”

“Hanji.”

“Y’know what I mean- pants off, behind closed doors.”

“Hanji.”

“I feel like he probably looks angry when he-”

“ _Hanji._ ”

Food was slipping off the edge of Eren’s fork back onto his plate, but he didn’t feel like he could break Hanji’s inquisitive stare from across the table.

He felt like a mouse being stared down by an owl.

Levi sighed beside him.

“I’m trying to eat,” he complained.

They waved a hand dismissively. “So eat. Eren and I are having a conversation.”

“Hanji’s just upset because Petra still has feelings for Levi,” Erwin commented quietly. For the first time since they’d met, Eren felt almost as though he could see everything that was hiding behind his soft smile.

“ _Erwin_ ,” Levi groaned beside him as Eren shot him an inquisitive look.

And with that, Hanji laid their head upon the table and began to wail petulantly.

“I don’t _understand_ ,” they whined, flattened tableside cheek rolling inwards and pushing their glasses crooked, “what does she see in you? What is it? Where’s the appeal? It’s not like you’re a good conversationalist, I just don’t _get_ it-”

A light flickered on in his head.

Eren made a noise of comprehension. “I knew there was something more to this,” he bayed. “I knew it was too weird for you to be friends with somebody who’s just really nosy about your sex life- Levi, are you cockblocking Hanji?”

They all reacted at once.

Erwin laughed quietly into his napkin.

Hanji’s head shot up from the table, glasses still askew over their ear.

Levi grunted in protest.

“I didn’t ask her to have a thing for me,” he objected, cutting off Hanji’s escalating gesticulations with a hand to the face. “I don’t know why she does, either, it’s just that this _thing-_ ” he jerked his head in Hanji’s direction “-can’t accept that Petra’s shitty taste might not be shitty enough to mean they have a shot.”

Eren blinked and then furrowed his eyebrows. “Hey, I like you and I don’t have shitty taste,” he said defensively.

“That’s not-”

“Why?” Hanji interjected eagerly, one cheek still red and ridged from pressing against the wood of the table. “Why do you like Levi? What is it about him that you like? Is he your type? Is it possible for Levi to be someone’s type? Are you a closeted masochist?”

Eren had already tuned them out after the initial question, frowning contemplatively as he thought about it.

 _‘Why do I like Levi?’_ he wondered. The answer was not immediately forthcoming.

“I just sort of do,” he ventured, puzzled by his own emotions. To his right, Erwin was laughing softly again. _‘But what is it about him?’_

“-doesn’t even _smile_ -”

He was so caught up in his thoughts that he didn’t even think about what came out of his mouth next.

“He doesn’t smile much, but I guess it’s more worth it when he does because of that, you know?” he mumbled absentmindedly, pushing his food around on his plate. He frowned again and looked up when he realized the table had fallen silent.

Levi had paused mid-bite, fork raised halfway to his lips.

Erwin was looking at him with mild surprise and unabashed interest.

Hanji was clutching their chest like they’d been shot.

“ _We’re keeping him_ ,” they announced forcefully, lunging across the table to take his face in their hands. A cup rattled off the edge. He heard it shatter on the floor. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Levi snatch his teacup up with deft fingers before Hanji’s elbow could hit it. “I don’t care if you and Levi have the worst breakup in the history of messy breakups- even, no, _especially_ those ones that end with bloodshed, Eren, I am so far from kidding right now- you are _always_ welcome in my home, no matter where that happens to be.” Their eyes were shining behind the thick lenses of their glasses. Eren grunted uncomfortably between their palms. “Whenever you get sick of this ornery pint-sized hermit, come visit me- we can research the cultural history of Tanzania together, I’ll teach you the language and we’ll pretend he doesn’t exist- no matter what happens, we’re friends, okay?”

“Uh,” he tried.

“ _Okay?”_ they repeated, expression stubborn.

“Okay,” he relented, sighing with relief when they released his face. He wondered if they were going to do that every time they got excited.

Beside him, Levi snorted. “Aren’t you getting ahead of yourself, shiteyes?” he asked rudely. “Who says we’re going to break up?” Eren looked at him in surprise.

So did Hanji and Erwin.

Levi flinched like he’d just remembered leaving raw meat on the counter or forgetting to lock the back door. “I didn’t mean-”

“Now _that_ ,” Erwin murmured, “is something I didn’t expect to hear from you.”

Though only for a moment, Levi looked like he was staring down the barrel of a gun- it was an expression Eren had seen on his face just once before, but he recognized it instantly.

Hanji’s smile was eerie and unwavering.

Levi sunk down in his seat and said nothing for the rest of the meal.

He wouldn’t meet Eren’s gaze for more than a split-second before dissolving into weirdly forceful, almost angry movements.

Eren resolved not to think too much about that.

***

Their first night at Hanji’s cottage ushered itself in with an interesting start.

“There’s only one bed,” Levi pointed out unnecessarily, sounding more perplexed than angry.

Eren glanced at him disinterestedly. “So what?”

“So there’s only one bed,” Levi repeated, eyebrows scrunching together. “ _Hanji_ ,” he called over his shoulder.

Eren heard them call back from the other bedroom. Levi yelled at them to ‘get the fuck over here or so help me god,’ which Eren found an amusing, if disproportionately urgent, choice of language in such a mundane situation.

Hanji was surprisingly heavy-footed at times- he could hear them thundering across the living room long before they appeared in the bedroom door.

“Hanji, why is there only one bed?” Levi demanded before they could even speak.

They shot him a quizzical look. “Why would there be more than one bed?”

Eren caught their eye and shrugged at them to make clear that he was similarly puzzled by Levi’s agitation.

Unfortunately, Levi caught him doing it.

“What, you’re fine with just sharing a bed with me for the next couple of nights?” Levi fired.

Eren considered it. “Yeah?” he said, the word coming out sounding like a question not for any indecision on his part, but for his confusion over why it mattered.

Levi paused.

A sinister smile started creeping across Hanji’s face.

“Well, since the issue here seems to be that there’s no issue,” they started, and then darted out of the room on lighter feet than they’d come in on.

Eren absentmindedly entertained the possibility that the heaviness of their footsteps was inversely proportionate to their level of excitement- when he’d arrived, they’d flown down the stairs and across the gravel driveway at him with a speed and spiderlike fluidity that made it seems like their feet hadn’t even touched the earth.

 _‘Maybe they get so excited they start to float,’_ he thought nonsensically, already digging through his duffel bag for something to sleep in.

He gradually became aware of the weight of the silence in the room, and decided quite firmly that he was not going to turn around and enable Levi’s aims, which he kind of suspected involved staring at his back in silence until he turned around.

When he started to change in the corner, still facing the wall, Levi finally caved.

“ _Oi_ , Eren,” he snapped, “are you really alright with this?”

Eren threw him another glance, arms still trapped in his sleeves. “Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?” Levi started shuffling restlessly on the other side of the room. Eren could see him doing it out of the corner of his eye. “Are you… not okay with it?” he ventured. The idea that Levi was opposed to sharing a bed with him made something in his stomach go a little bit sideways.

“It’s not that, it’s-” he responded immediately, freezing and then shuffling and fidgeting with renewed fervour.

Eren thought it’d be funny if it wasn’t so confusing.

“Which side do you want?” Levi asked stiffly.

“Huh?”

“Which side do you want?” Levi repeated, starting to look frustrated. “Of the bed. For sleeping. Which side of the bed do you want to sleep on?”

Eren blinked very slowly and vacantly at him as he shucked his shirt from his arms and tossed it on top of his bag without checking to see if it landed as intended. “Does that,” he started, even less clear on what was happening than he had been a moment ago, “does that really matter?”

The look that question earned him suggested that _he_ was the one who was being strange and unreasonable. “Of course it matters,” he insisted, “what the hell am I going to do if you end up spread all over my side of the damn thing? This isn’t exactly a huge bed,” he said, gesturing at it curtly.

It was not a particularly large bed, no.

It was also not an especially small one.

Large enough for a couple, but probably too small for a couple of friends.

Eren closed his eyes for a moment and fought back the urge to laugh.

He was getting a very dim idea of what it was that was troubling Levi, and like most things Levi seemed to find incredibly concerning, Eren found it spectacularly weird.

“Close the door and get on the bed,” he ordered, and sighed when Levi bristled.

“I’m not a dog, you can’t just-”

“ _Please_ close the door and get on the bed.” He sent Levi his best pleading look. “Please.”

He hesitated for a moment before reluctantly complying. He looked a little suspicious, twitching when the heavy tongue of the door latch slid into place with a spring-loaded clang, but the way he crawled over the covers to a point pretty close to exactly one-quarter of the way across the bed was the sort of behaviour Armin would have found very telling.

Eren just found it bemusing and kind of endearing in an incredibly strange way.

He hopped onto the bed from his side, not giving half as much thought to keeping the covers unruffled as Levi had, and immediately scooted closer to the center. Levi shifted onto his side, eyebrows drawing together as he evaluated the amount of space Eren was taking up relative to the amount he was.

Eren rolled his eyes and rolled over, turning his back on him.

Levi had just enough time to say,

“I don’t understand the point of this,”

before Eren wriggled backwards until he felt his shoulder blades hit the chest behind him- and, more importantly, until his ass was comfortably tucked against the groin it had been homing in on. He grabbed Levi’s hand where it had frozen, stiff with surprise, in the air above him, and tugged Levi’s arm around his waist, snuggling back purposefully.

Levi was speechless for long enough that Eren began to trace his fingers over his palm curiously, relishing the dissonance of character he found between the careful, almost prim lines of his neatly trimmed fingernails and the hard, unforgiving calluses of his palm.

“Uh,” Levi said finally, edging his hips back so they weren’t flush against the curve of Eren’s ass.

Eren frowned and scooted back to nestle in them again. As he rubbed up against the front of Levi’s pants, his frown gave way to a little grin. “Oh, what’s this?” he teased, rolling back against the distinctive hardness he could feel forming behind him. “Did you forget to take your phone out of your pocket?”

“That’s my dick, and you fucking know that,” Levi said gruffly, and Eren couldn’t stop himself from laughing.

“Relax,” he coaxed, pressing himself against Levi and tugging him closer. He made a pleased little sound when Levi tucked his arm under the far side of his waist obligingly. “I hope you don’t really think we’re going to be sleeping with a foot of space between us,” he ribbed lightly, turning his head to glance back at him as best he could. “You’re in for a hell of a shock if you do.”

Levi shifted restlessly behind him, silence pensive even as Eren’s ministrations brought the state of his burgeoning erection from ‘probably a dick against my ass’ to ‘definitely a dick against my ass, no doubt about it’.

“If this is how you’re planning to sleep,” he mumbled uncertainly, “that might be a problem.”

“Oh?” Eren hummed, enjoying the way Levi sucked in a breath through his teeth when he began to rock back against his hips more insistently almost as much he enjoyed the feeling of Levi’s erection straining against the fabric of his jeans.

“Actually, no, that is absolutely going to be a problem,” Levi sighed, voice a little strained. Eren whined as Levi gently pried his arm loose and edged away.

He rolled onto his stomach with a wronged grunt, surreptitiously adjusting his own erection before settling listlessly on the blankets and fixing Levi with a sullen stare. “Why is it ‘absolutely a problem’?” he asked tonelessly.

Levi’s lips thinned. “Eren, if you’re going to be rubbing up on me like that-” he started, and then rolled onto his knees with a slight grimace, a joint popping ominously. “I know you spend most of the day at half-fucking-mast and can probably fall asleep like that, but I can’t- if I try to sleep while I’m fucking-” he gestured uselessly, like he was searching for the words and couldn’t find them. Eren suppressed a grin. “If I try to sleep all fucking tangled up with you, I’m not going to get any sleep at all.” His eyes slid away from Eren’s, settling somewhere above the headboard. “You’re distracting.”

Eren felt the grin spreading across his lips. “Okay, one,” he started, “I do _not_ spend most of the day with a chubby, that’s literally just around you.” He considered it. “And only because you never want to screw around,” he explained defensively. “And two: I think you kind of missed the point.”

Levi shot him a wary look.

Eren rolled over onto his back, grabbed Levi by the front of his shirt and pulled insistently.

It took a moment for Levi to fall forward onto his hands. Eren suspected it had more to do with an unwillingness to have his shirt torn than any weakness of body. He had a pretty good idea of what Levi’s body was capable of- good enough to know that he couldn’t have pulled him over from a crouch without properly unbalancing him.

Levi _leaned_ more than fell, really- it was a slow, almost cinematic fall, one he marked by carefully fumbling one hand to the other side of Eren’s waist so it wouldn’t land squarely in the center of Eren’s gut.

Eren could see his stomach muscles going taut with exertion as he did it. He chewed the inside of his lip and pulled at his shirt again. “Come _here_ ,” he whined demandingly. When Levi hesitated, he groaned, squirming sideways until he had Levi’s hips between his knees. He wrapped one of them around Levi’s waist suggestively, curling his free hand over the back of his neck and tugging down. “The point is: let’s screw around. I’m fucking horny. You’re fucking hard, ergo: also fucking horny. Come here.”

He looked torn, but not opposed. Eren watched his throat bob as he swallowed indecisively. “Someone could hear us.”

Eren resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “So we’ll have to be quiet,” he dismissed. “ _Levi,_ ” he breathed, not thinking about much of anything except the way his pants felt uncomfortably tight and how he’d like not to be wearing them, “get the fuck _down_ here.”

Levi did, though not without a grumble of concerned protest, rutting against him and kissing him urgently when Eren released a moan that came out a little louder than he’d intended it to.

Eren fumbled with the fly of his jeans eagerly.

Levi caught his hand. “Hey, stop.” His voice was a husky breath in Eren’s ear. It made it difficult for him to reconcile the content of Levi’s statement with his tone.

“Why?”

He hadn’t meant to ask- he was normally very good at being told ‘no’.

It was just that Levi’s breath had hitched when he’d reached for his button and he didn’t look or sound like he really _wanted_ him to stop.

Levi swallowed again, but didn’t say anything.

Eren gave him a narrow stare. He felt, for a moment, unusually clever, as he often did in times of need. “Wait, this isn’t because we’ve always done it with our clothes still on, is it?”

Levi’s evasive look made clear that this was _precisely_ why.

He sighed and tugged petulantly at the front of Levi’s jeans without moving to unbutton them. “ _Levi,_ ” he whined, past shame- though he could hear a dim echo of Armin’s voice muttering darkly that he’d never had any to start with somewhere in the recesses of distant memory- and pulling at the collar of his shirt again.

Whatever Levi had been about to say, whether it was a protest or reprimand or an apology, came to an abrupt halt when Eren yanked his shirt away from his throat and began sucking and nibbling on the crook of his shoulder.

In spite of everything he did not know and everything else he had never bothered to learn thanks to his poor attention span and general indifference towards things that did not interest him, Eren was a quick learner when it came to things that did, and while he’d never dared manhandle Levi’s immaculate clothing before, dissuaded by what he felt was a completely legitimate fear of abruptly finding his general manhandling privileges revoked wholesale, he had long since noticed- with no small amount of glee- that Levi’s breath started to sound a little irregular when his lips and teeth and tongue grew closer the base of his throat.

It wasn’t something Levi often let him do for very long, but right then, he wasn’t pulling away, and the current moment was the absolute extent to which Eren cared about anything at that particular point in time. He felt Levi’s body shudder over him as he nipped his collarbone experimentally.

“Eren,” he said instead, voice a little lower in his throat, a little huskier than Eren was accustomed to, a little dangerous in a way he hadn’t realized he was into, “don’t you fucking dare leave a mark on me.”

He took the warning with the other, more welcome message he felt it had come bundled alongside: the unspoken permission to continue. He began to undo the buttons of Levi’s shirt carefully, not wanting to push his luck too far.

When Levi made no move to stop him, instead shifting his weight to one hand and smoothing the other over his bare stomach, Eren flicked the rest of his buttons open in a few impatient, well-practiced movements.

Levi laughed into his ear, sounding equal parts amused and surprised. “Did you do that with one hand?”

“Yeah,” Eren breathed, smoothing that same hand up his bare chest admiringly. His breath hitched in his throat when Levi ran a calloused thumb between his hipbone and the soft swell of muscle over of his pelvis, dipping briefly under the line of his jeans. Eren brought his other hand up, pushing Levi’s shirt over the hard curve of his shoulders. “You’re wearing too many clothes,” he coaxed, impatiently tugging the loose fabric of his shirt out of the way of the leg he’d looped over him earlier so he could drag the rough denim of his pants against the bare skin of Levi’s waist. “ _I’m_ wearing too many clothes. This is a problem.”

This time, he heard, rather than saw, Levi swallow. Eren nipped at the skin of his throat a little harder than he’d really meant to, but if the shudder that ran up his spine was anything to go by, it wasn’t unwelcome, so he did it again.

When Levi’s caressing fingers fell from teasing the skin above his jeans to fumbling with his button, he groaned aloud with relief.

“Too loud,” Levi hissed warningly, but Eren had already popped the button of his pants open and slid the zipper down, barely aware that Levi was struggling with his. He had to restrain himself from immediately shoving his hand under the tantalizing line of Levi’s underwear- his hands twitched uncertainly in the air for a long moment.

“Off,” he said finally, shoving Levi’s shirt off of his shoulders again and hastily yanking his own pants open when Levi sat up to oblige him. He barely registered the sound of consternation that answered his subsequent attempt to squirm out of his pants altogether until Levi sighed, grabbed the hems of his jeans, and yanked.

He supposed it had to happen sooner or later- he was not especially graceful and Levi was, at least to his eyes, uncommonly strong.

The price of his sudden freedom was an equally sudden roll off of the bed and a somewhat noisy encounter with the floor.

He blinked away dizziness, legs still propped skyward against the side of the bed.

“Well, that was fucking sexy. Are you okay?”

Despite the concern Levi tried to affect, he’d already _heard_ the snort that had escaped him when Eren fell.

Eren narrowed his eyes and scrambled back up onto the bed, fully prepared to call him out on his insensitivity.

He changed his mind with equal alacrity when his crawling brought him face-to-face with the front of Levi’s underwear, jeans sagging on the bed around his bent knees. He could see the heavy curve of his barely diminished erection quite clearly through it.

He brought his mouth to the fabric on pure impulse alone. It wasn’t as satisfying- in a way, he decided it may very well have been more of a tease to him than it was to Levi, because he could smell and just barely taste what lay underneath, but the dry cotton blend was an unpleasantly frustrating barrier.

Levi groaned, shoving him back and flicking his forehead hard enough to make him yelp.

“Jesus, let me get my pants off before I put you outside with your dog, you horny little shit,” he scolded, stepping off the bed and out of his pants.

Any other moment, the sight of him folding his jeans in crisp, prim little motions before setting them on the bedside table would have seemed ridiculous for a number of reasons.

At that particular moment, it was ridiculous to Eren for exactly one: the unacceptable distance between his mouth and Levi’s dick.

“Let me blow you,” he said without preamble, and only felt the look Levi was giving him because he was quite preoccupied with eying his still-clothed erection hungrily.

“What the _hell_ ,” Levi started, “is with you and putting my dick in your mouth?” To his credit, he didn’t sound critical or annoyed, just exasperated and a little confused.

“You have a really nice dick,” Eren said absently, shrugging without lifting his eyes. He watched Levi’s hand dip under the elastic top of his underwear as he adjusted himself self-consciously.

“You didn’t even know what my dick looked like the first time you decided you wanted to blow me,” he pointed out edgily. “I think you just have a thing about it. A thing where you get off to sucking off,” he accused, and then shuffled awkwardly, tacking on an uncomfortable, “or something.”

Eren frowned as he noticed Levi’s erection starting to soften under his scrutiny, and flicked his eyes up to Levi’s face.

He was looking at him with an expression that was four parts manufactured indifference, two parts defensive scorn, and one part barely perceptible anxiety.

Eren wondered when he’d started being able to see so many details through the cracks in Levi’s poker face.

“Are you calling me some kind of cock slut?” he asked, mock-serious.

Levi’s eyes widened slightly and he stiffened. “I didn’t mean-”

“I’m not usually like this, scout’s honour,” Eren admitted, grinning a little lopsidedly. “I mean, I like dick as a general rule, I just-” He laughed sheepishly without really knowing why. “I just really like _your_ dick. A lot. No fucking idea why, just really fucking hot for your meat. I guess maybe a part of me knew it was good without even seeing it? Like some sort of Spidey-sense for really awesome dick. I sensed your dick coming and wanted it in my mouth.”

Levi was staring at him openly.

“Still want it in my mouth, honestly,” Eren continued, starting to feel a little nervous.

Levi’s eyebrows drew together. “About half of that was easily the most incomprehensible garbage I have ever heard come out of your mouth,” he started, and then wrinkled his nose. “And never say the words ‘hot for your meat’ again, my dick’s gone fucking soft.”

This was, in fact, a bald-faced lie, as Levi was still easily half-hard. Eren had been paying close attention.

“Please let me blow you,” he said instead of pointing out this fact, which he felt might ruin whatever chance he had left.

Levi made as if to climb back onto the bed and then stopped, fidgeting. “I didn’t bring any condoms.”

Eren had. He knew precisely where they were in his bag and exactly what he’d been thinking when he’d put them there, which had been a mixture between a general sense of,

_‘Just to be safe,’_

and the somewhat contradictory,

_‘If I don’t tell Levi I brought any, maybe I can convince him to let me blow him without one,’_

which, in a spectacularly unsurprising coincidence, happened to be precisely the same thing he was thinking at that exact moment.

He was many things. An opportunist was one. Occasionally selfish was another.

“I won’t make a mess,” he promised, reaching out and plucking at the waistband of Levi’s underwear persuasively.

Levi hesitated for a long moment and then swore under his breath, climbing back onto the bed. Eren started to shuffle back eagerly to make room for him before changing his mind- he wanted to be closer, not farther away.

Levi was still only half-kneeling when Eren grabbed him by the hip and started to mouth him impatiently through his underwear again. Eren felt his dick twitch under the fabric and grinned, nuzzling his nose and cheek against the fast-hardening swell of it almost euphorically.

“And he says he’s not a damn cock slut,” Levi muttered skeptically, even as he pulled his erection free with one hand and pushed down his underwear with the other.

Eren didn’t dignify that with an answer- at least not one that involved words.

He licked a teasing stripe from where Levi’s hand was still closed around the base right up to the ridged underside of the head and heard Levi inhale shakily.

 _‘This,’_ he thought dreamily, prying Levi’s hand free so he could get his own around it, _‘this is what I wanted.’_

It wasn’t just the familiar weight of it against his lips- it was all the little things. The fine details that were lost under the latex- the meandering veins, prominent against the shaft. The texture, silken over the hardness beneath. The heat, radiating from the skin like a pulse. The smell, musky, almost pungent, without being unpleasant. The taste, a little salty, unexpectedly sweet as he flicked his tongue over the tip.

It just wasn’t the _same_. He knew, logically, that the condom had been there not just for cleanliness, but for caution, but he also knew, much more immediately, that he just couldn’t lavish the same attention through a condom he could without one. The finesse of it all was lost.

He couldn’t suck and lick and tease to the same effect.

And _what_ an effect.

Levi’s hand was already in his hair and he hadn’t even taken his dick into his mouth properly yet. He smirked as he toyed with the head playfully, slipping it into his mouth only to pop it out again and tongue the underside.

Whatever remained of Levi’s stone-faced composure was completely gone. The pained look was back. The unfocused hair pulling and petting was back, too.

“Jesus,” he muttered tightly, much the same way he’d been muttering it endlessly under his breath for the past few minutes. When Eren sucked lightly on the shaft before dragging his tongue up it again, he shuddered, tugging on his hair. “Are you actually planning on-” He stopped, hissing in a breath when Eren licked the liquid from his tip with a teasing flutter of his tongue. “Are you actually planning on blowing me,” he panted, and Eren paused, “or are you trying to get me so fucking worked up my heart stops?”

Eren thought about it. While he did, his mouth said something in the general vicinity of,

“Has anyone ever told you that you’ve got a really great dick for anal?”

which he realized fairly immediately was a rather strange thing to say under most circumstances and subsequently came to, he thought, the sensible conclusion that he should probably be using his mouth for more useful things.

Levi was starting to look at him like he was very seriously contemplating questioning him about his history of head traumas and childhood glue abuse again, but the look disintegrated into something considerably more overwhelmed as Eren’s mouth sank down over his erection, and all he managed was a quiet, breathless,

“ _Yeah_.”

Eren popped his mouth free, looking up at him curiously. “Wait, was that just a, like, ‘yeah, that feels really fucking good’ yeah, or was that a ‘yeah, somebody once told me I have a really great dick for anal’ yeah, because now I’m really curious.”

“The second one,” Levi mumbled vaguely, gently tugging at his hair, face flushed and eyelids heavy. “Both. _Eren_ -”

“Really? Who?” Eren asked, fascinated, nuzzling Levi’s dick when it fell against his cheek. When he turned to give it an idle lick, Levi gave him a stare that was just as desperate as it was incredulous.

“Eren, for the love of _god_ , I’ll tell you later,” he swore, using his free hand to guide his erection to Eren’s lips imploringly, fingers curling over his scalp in a way that made him shiver, “don’t just fucking _stop_ , you’re killing me-”

“Oh, that’s a change of tune,” Eren teased, but Levi’s groan of frustration faded quickly as he opened his mouth and slid his lips over him again.

The growing ache in his jaw was still there, but the naked weight of Levi’s erection on his tongue was infinitely more satisfying.

He sank down farther, pushing his limits boldly as he caressed the not-so-distant base and realized it was the girth rather the length that was testing him.

And suddenly Levi was vocalizing.

“ _Shit_ ,” he moaned quietly, voice cracking a little. “Oh shit, _Eren_ , holy fucking _shit_ -”

Eren chuckled a little around him, diligently ignoring the low, troubled protest his gag reflex was sending out, nose still buried in the trimmed curls above Levi’s dick. He was proud of himself for not gagging when it twitched convulsively in his mouth.

The vibrations of his laughter seemed to echo through Levi’s entire body- a shudder ran through him and burst out of his mouth in a soft groan.

Eren hummed softly again before deciding it was what was aggravating his usually docile gag reflex, so he opted for the other option. The other option was not sucking- when it was difficult to breathe, it was similarly difficult to suck.

So he swallowed.

Levi’s hand spasmed in his hair. “Fuck!” he yelped, far louder than Eren knew he meant to, hips bucking forwards involuntarily. When Eren began alternating between long bobs of his head and swallowing around him, he started to chant curses endlessly and desperately like he was reciting a prayer.

Eren was watching Levi’s face, but he felt the sudden surge of stiffness and tasted bitterness on the back of his tongue before he registered the suddenly tense way Levi was looking at him.

He swallowed more out of reflex than conscious decision, torn from his enjoyment of Levi’s stifled moaning by the astonished and somewhat humorously inopportune realization that the rumours about diet and flavour really were true.

He popped his mouth free and tentatively licked his lips, mulling over the realization that he’d endured years of unpleasantness for the assumption that it simply couldn’t be helped. He felt slightly betrayed.

Levi was sagging heavily on the edge of the bed, leaning on a forearm, underwear still bunched carelessly around his thighs. He was plucking at them lethargically, eyes half-closed and breathing heavy.

Eren popped his jaw with a groan and helped him pull them back up to where they belonged, humming lustfully as Levi fixed him with a languid, vacant look.

He put his hand on Levi’s thigh and was about to make some hopeful reference to his own untended erection when he heard the scratching at the door.

He saw Levi hear it- registered the brief convulsive expression of confusion and the understanding that followed it. He began to turn. Eren grabbed his face urgently, nosing his cheek. “Hey,” he breathed, coaxing. “Just ignore it.”

“Cat,” Levi murmured, sounding a little clearer but still not entirely present. “Gotta let the cat in.”

“Don’t let the cat in,” Eren whispered.

“I have to,” Levi insisted, and that was when Duchess started meowing demandingly on the other side of the door.

Eren fell back on the bed and closed his eyes with a groan of disbelief when he stood. Levi blinked at him, pausing with his hand on the doorknob.

“It’s a good thing your dog is here,” he commented as Duchess sauntered past him through the crack with a look of great offense. “She would’ve been doing that the whole time otherwise.”

Eren cracked open an eye to shoot Levi a displeased look. “So we could’ve let her in and then ignored her. She’s just a cat. It’s the interruption that’s killing the mood,” he groused.

Levi looked at him with a weary expression, but all he said was,

“She stares.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is this a bad time to comment that Duchess is based off of my cat? Because Duchess is based off of my cat. _Cats_ , man.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I haven't forgotten about you.

He woke up cold, or at least colder than he’d expected to, and started searching for Levi’s warmth before he even knew what it was he was looking for.

When he didn’t find it, he furrowed his eyebrows and cracked bleary eyes open with a frown.

The bed was empty.

The sheets on both sides of him were as cold as they would have been if they hadn’t been slept on at all.

He knew, logically, that Levi couldn’t have gotten far, but his absence still unsettled and upset him anyway.

The chill of the floor against his bare feet felt like a cruel punchline to the joke that was unexpectedly waking up alone. He wrestled on his pyjama pants sullenly, barely remembering to bother with a shirt before he yanked the door to the main area open.

Erwin was lingering on couch with one of his ankles resting on his other knee and a book in one hand.

He was wearing reading glasses- the narrow, unobtrusive kind with arms and a nose piece but no real frame for the lenses. The sight brought him short.

Combined with the persistent sense of strangeness seeing Levi’s immaculately-dressed co-worker in casual slacks and grandfatherly sweaters awoke in him, the glasses made the man seem old in a way he could only really express by calling to mind slow-aging celebrities.

He looked about thirty, dressed like he was in his sixties, and spoke with the patient assurance of a ninety-year-old.

Talking to him made Eren feel a little like the generic title character of a coming-of-age film- every conversation felt like it was supposed to impart some life-changing wisdom that he wouldn’t truly understand until the time came for him realize it.

The night before, he’d found himself searching for meaning in the way Erwin described the process of properly basting a chicken.

“Good morning,” Erwin greeted, closing his book on a finger and nodding amiably at him. His smile lent the scene a certain gravity, a weight of importance that tempered Eren’s sullenness with a strange anxiety.

He didn’t like that. He was determined to be upset with Levi, and that would be very difficult if he spent too long considering why he didn’t have a right to be. Erwin’s presence was evoking an alien desire to engage in self-reflection. The two did not mix particularly well.

“Where’s Levi?” he asked rudely, and then flinched at his own abruptness. “Um, good morning.”

Erwin was eying him with open amusement. “You should make sure to spend time with people other than just Levi, Eren,” he joked lightly, “it looks like he’s rubbing off on you. I was hoping it might be the other way around.”

The comment was meant innocently, and a part of him knew that, but Eren was a creature of instinct at heart, and the part of him that used his brain to think didn’t catch the part of him that used it to respond in time to stop the sudden memory of the night before from surging guiltily over his features.

Erwin’s heavy eyebrows rose slowly. He looked amused.

“Where’s Hanji?” It was a slow question asked much too late to do anything but advertise the fact that he was trying to direct the conversation away from anything inadvertently suggestive, but Erwin was a kind man who indulged his poor attempt.

“They’ve taken Cheddar for a run on the trails,” he smiled, and then looked over his glasses inquisitively.

It took Eren a moment to suss out what the question was. “Oh, yeah, that’s fine,” he assured once he had. “Yeah, she’ll love that, I’m glad they’re getting along so well.” He fidgeted. Erwin was looking at him expectantly. “So where’s Levi?”

Erwin’s secretive smile only worsened the feeling that he wasn’t quite understanding the lesson he was supposed to be learning. “He’s been in the woods all morning,” he answered cryptically.

“Don’t tell him shit you know he’s going to misunderstand, Erwin,” Levi grumbled, which would have been startling enough even if he hadn’t said it from directly behind Eren, somewhere in the general vicinity of between his shoulder blades. 

Eren half-stumbled, half-jumped forwards, clutching at his chest. “Jesus Christ,” he wheezed- dimly, he could hear Erwin murmuring ‘I think he’s already misunderstood, Levi’ from the couch- and then, as he mapped the bruised-looking smudges under Levi’s eyes, he remembered that he was supposed to be angry. “Where did you go?”

Levi blinked. “I was collecting firewood,” he answered, eyebrows drawing together just enough to lightly crease the skin between them.

“No, I mean-” he glanced back at Erwin, who had gone back to reading his book- or at least, politely pretending to- and lowered his voice anyway. “You were gone when I woke up.”

Levi looked increasingly bewildered.

Eren’s already limited patience started to fray. “You just _left_ ,” he accused, trying to shove his hands in his pockets and growing even more frustrated when he realized his pyjama pants didn’t have any. “You just left without waking me up- or saying _anything_.”

He could almost see the gears turning in Levi’s head. In a moment of uncharacteristic self-awareness, he realized with no small amount of chagrin that this was precisely how he’d made Armin feel so many times before. The revelation did not improve his mood.

He was almost ready to commit violence when something finally clicked in Levi’s expression.

“I only sleep three or four hours a night,” he blurted out, belated adding a mumbled, “sorry,” a moment later.

Eren stared at him. “Okay, one: I don’t understand what that has to do with anything,” he started, “and two: I thought it was Hanji that sleeps three or four hours a night, I don’t-”

“Three to five- and how do you think I know they only sleep that much? Use your brain, Eren,” Levi interrupted, eyebrows furrowing. He looked fully prepared to say something caustic, but paused, letting his eyes flicker over Eren’s face for a moment before closing them and taking a deep breath.

The exhale left him looking more tired than frustrated.

“I’m not-” he ventured, and then waved a vague hand and started over. “It’s not that I don’t sleep more than four hours,” he mumbled, “it’s that I _can’t_.” Eren watched his mouth pinch and recognized, with a jolt of surprise, the expression as apprehension. “I wasn’t going to wake you up just because I couldn’t sleep.”

Eren wanted to be angry.

The alternative was feeling foolish and embarrassed by what looked uncomfortably like a childish overreaction in hindsight. He struggled with it and only managed a petulant, “oh.”

For a moment, Levi looked like he was going to say something with a passing resemblance to an apology, but his awkwardly vulnerable expression was gone, replaced with annoyance before anything of that sort happened.

“Oi, stop that,” he snapped abruptly. Eren was fully prepared to indulge his earlier desire to be pissed off when he realized that Levi’s eyes had fixed on a point behind him. “Stop fucking listening in on my conversation.”

He craned to look and found Erwin looking up from his book with a politely puzzled expression. “I beg your pardon, were you speaking to me, Levi?”

From the corner of his eye, he could see Levi glowering. “Don’t pull that shit with me, you nosy bastard.”

Eren wasn’t sure who to believe- Levi, who seemed certain beyond any possibility of doubt that Erwin had been surreptitiously eavesdropping, or Erwin, who looked perplexed but affable, as though bouts of paranoia were something he’d come to expect from Levi.

He just didn’t know.

Levi mumbled something he couldn’t quite make out and grabbed Eren’s forearm to get his attention, jerking his head towards the door meaningfully before he let go.

For someone considerably shorter than him, and whose build was not especially leggy, Levi walked with an impatient quickness that Eren had to trot to keep up with. Eren had to scramble to catch the door before it swung shut behind him, and he paused only for a moment, as he was pulling on his shoes, to glance back into the house.

He found Erwin watching him with clear interest, but the man didn’t look away as if he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t have been when he made eye contact. He simply smiled.

Levi was halfway down the stairs by the time Eren turned back around.

He almost fell down them trying to catch up.

***

The lake wasn’t especially broad, but it was long, more like a wide section of river than an independent body of water.

When he slowed down and finally thought about it for more than a moment, Eren realized that its size was what had attracted Levi to it- why, after they’d left the cottage, he’d immediately made for the dock and started to walk briskly along the shoreline.

It was the sort of lake that was good for swimming and fishing, probably a decent size for a small boat, but not really big enough to attract boats with any discernable sort of engine or the kind of people who preferred that sort of thing. It was a quiet lake.

After Levi’s pace had slowed and Eren finally caught up and fell into step with him, he spoke.

“That idiot’s in love with Hanji,” he said out of nowhere.

It took Eren a long moment to catch up mentally. When he did, he couldn’t stop himself from spluttering. “Erwin is?”

Levi grunted in confirmation, stepping primly over a fallen log. “Has been for a long-ass time. He’ll watch us and tell them anything he thinks they want to know.”

Eren took a break from being bewildered just long enough to conclude that Levi was explaining why he’d wanted them to leave the cottage. He was no less bewildered by the sentiment surrounding the admission, though.

“Okay. So,” he started, “Erwin is in love with Hanji.”

Levi grunted again.

“Does Hanji know? I mean, they must, if it’s been so long, so-”

Levi just shot him a dry look. “No,” he said flatly. “Hanji’s brilliant when it comes to their work, but they don’t look too hard at people unless you give them a reason to.” He paused for a moment, kicking a rock into the water and stepping back from the splash it caused. “And Erwin’s a hell of an actor.”

Eren stopped walking to think, which he knew didn’t say anything especially flattering about his intelligence, but the time it took Levi to notice he’d fallen behind and double back was invaluable.

“Okay,” he said again, grasping at the dim edges of an epiphany he couldn’t quite make out. “So how do you know Erwin’s in love with Hanji? If he’s such a good actor, I mean.”

“He told me once, when he thought I was too drunk to remember,” Levi told him, shrugging. “I’m never too drunk to remember. It was a long time ago, but once you notice, you don’t stop noticing.”

He nodded heavily, mulling it over. “And Erwin hasn’t told Hanji.” It was more of a statement than a question.

“No. Thinks it’ll hold them back if they return the sentiment, or some other shit like that. He’s that kind of guy.”

He almost had it, that ephemeral thought that was eluding him.

“But… how long?”

Levi looked amused and little puzzled by his line of questioning. “Nine years, give or take? They’ve known each other ten.”

He had it.

“And you haven’t told Hanji because…?” he prompted.

Levi looked at him like he was stupid.

For a moment he doubted himself, but then Levi said,

“Erwin’s a grown-ass man, this isn’t fucking middle school,”

in a tone that came out a little too defensive.

Eren looked at him thoughtfully. “It kind of sounds like you just haven’t said anything because you personally don’t want deal with the fallout,” he mused, considering the wisdom of keeping his mouth shut even as he failed to. “I mean, it’s good to be a loyal friend, but sometimes you… sometimes you just, um… Levi?”

Levi’s reaction was spectacular to Eren in precisely the same way fireworks or thunderstorms were to a nervous housedog.

The handful of seconds it took for him to apprehensively recognize the look of scandalized shock and sullen guilt Levi responded to his accusation with as the face of someone who knew perfectly well they were being selfish but did not appreciate being called out on it was not nearly enough time to prepare himself.

“Excuse me?” he snarled, stepping forward. Eren could see his jaw muscles working furiously as he gritted his teeth. “And exactly who do you think you are to be telling me why I kept my mouth shut about something that isn’t even _my_ business and sure as _shit_ isn’t _yours?”_ He stepped forward again. Eren stumbled a little as he tried to step back. “Hah? You going to tell me why it is you think you know better?”

“Uh,” he managed, and only really registered that he’d raised his hands defensively when Levi slapped them down.

“Stop looking at me like that, I’m not going to fucking hit you,” he snapped. “Answer the damn question, Eren.”

“Uh,” he repeated, instincts hollering quite insistently that the dangerous look in Levi’s eyes was reading loud and clear as _I won’t hit you, but I want to_. He fought to keep his arms at his sides and settled for shoving them nervously in his pockets.

Of course, he still wasn’t wearing pants with pockets. He crossed his arms hastily over his chest instead.

“We’ve got all fucking day, kid,” Levi told him with a ferocious intensity that seemed to suggest that his patience was far less generous than his words implied. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

“ _Uh,_ ” Eren started, and then, as Levi’s upper lip started to curl back from his teeth alarmingly, “someone who can’t keep his mouth shut when he should- that’s who I am.” He swallowed against dryness as Levi’s face smoothed cautiously into something a little calmer. “That’s who I am.”

“That’s what I thought,” he murmured, and started to turn away.

Eren was, in fact, someone who couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

True to form, he failed to.

“That wasn’t an apology,” he said quietly. “I still think I’m right.”

The look Levi shot him promised things he couldn’t identify but still did not want to experience. “ _What_?”

“Look, before you get pissed again-”

“I’m already pissed off, Eren,” Levi snarled.

He waved frantically in an ill-conceived attempt to make himself understood. “No, listen, just- _shut up_ ,” he said, and did his best not to stumble over his words under the force of Levi’s affronted look. “Just shut up for a second, okay? Look: when I said I don’t know when to keep my mouth shut, I wasn’t just talking about this- about right now, with you.”

Levi rocked back on his heels with a look of cold contemplation, but said nothing.

Eren took that as an invitation to continue. “Look,” he started again, “I’m always saying shit I shouldn’t be saying- and I _know_ ,” he explained, a little distracted by Levi’s sudden scrutiny. “I _know_ that I’m doing it when I do it. It’s like-” He gestured clumsily, frustrated by his lack of eloquence. “I’ll be thinking about it, thinking _‘I really shouldn’t say that’_ or _‘I should probably lie about this’_ and even as I’m thinking that, it just… comes out.”

Levi looked like he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to be irritated or amused.

“I can lie really well when it feels like it’s important, but,” Eren admitted, “I don’t- I don’t think the things I think are important are the same things other people think are important. You can’t ask me about things I don’t feel that way about, because if it’s something simple, I’ll just lie so badly about it you’ll want to hit me, and if it’s something complicated, I’ll be so busy thinking about how to lie about it I’ll just blurt it out honestly. If I have to think about it, I can’t lie about it.”

Levi was starting to look a little lost.

“I know it seems like I’m rambling,” Eren fumbled, “but I promise I have a point, I just-”

The words were starting to tangle in his mouth.

He looked at Levi for a long moment, and forced himself to stop.

“I know you think I’m stupid,” Eren told him frankly, and waved a dismissive hand when Levi twitched guiltily. “You’re not wrong. I don’t like to think- I will actually _avoid_ thinking if you let me, and yeah, that probably doesn’t say much for how smart I am.” He marveled dimly at the striking paleness of Levi’s eyes. “It’s like… the more I think, the more pissed off I get. If I don’t understand something without having to think about it, I’m probably never going to understand it, and-” He took a deep breath and tried to quell the familiar uncertainty his rambling was causing him. “I promise there’s a point to this and it has something to do with what we’re talking about, you just have to let me get there. Sometimes I know I have something pretty important to say, but I don’t know what it is until it comes out, and I know that probably doesn’t make any sense to you, but it’s like that right now. So, just- just shut up for a couple of minutes and be patient with me, okay?”

The look Levi was giving him made him a little nervous.

He could see that something had clicked for him- he’d understood, or thought he understood, something about what Eren was saying, and it had coloured his penetrating stare with an unfamiliar thoughtfulness.

“I’m shutting up and being patient,” he said after Eren hesitated.

Eren struggled to find his train of thought and then told himself not to. “You know, I also kind of feel like you think I’m better with people than I really am,” he said instead. “In high school, I barely had any friends- I got into fights all the time. I was always getting suspended. Sometimes I got my friends suspended, too.” He fidgeted at the bittersweet feeling the memory aroused. “It’s hard for me to talk to people without accidentally saying something I shouldn’t, and the more I think about what I’m saying, the worse it gets, so I get-” He could feel the frustration rising and shook his head briskly. “They always tell you to think before you speak, or, if you don’t get something, to just think about it, and that has never worked for me. I can’t even try it anymore. I was pissed off all the time when I was a kid, and I can’t do it- it’s so fucking exhausting, and it’s never helped me.”

The air smelled like lake water and fresh pine needles. He looked at the water and watched it lap against the rocks.

“I actually really like that you don’t seem to know how to talk to people like a normal person,” he confessed, and then backtracked. “No, I mean- that sounds really weird, I know, but-” He licked his lips, feeling oddly like he was treading into dangerous territory. “You’re easy to talk to. You’re easy for _me_ to talk to. That doesn’t happen a lot. Even with my friends, sometimes I’ll say something and I’ll know it makes them uncomfortable, but they’ll just pretend I didn’t say it, and that actually makes it worse for me.” He wasn’t really looking at the water anymore, but he didn’t want to look up. “It’s never like that with you. I say stupid shit to you all the time and you just make fun of me for it, but not in a way that pisses me off, just- you call me on being an idiot and then it’s done, and I don’t feel like I’ve fucked up and should just stop talking.”

“Eren,” Levi called quietly.

Eren looked at him without looking up.

“I think you might’ve lost the point you were trying to make.”

He jerked out of his hunching posture and slapped himself lightly- Levi looked startled and a little bemused. “No, it’s still there, just give me a second,” he protested, and clung to the closest thought still available. “I’ve always been like this,” he declared, determined to find his way back to where he’d been going originally. “So I’ve- I’ve done this a lot, I’ve said a lot of stupid shit, and- and I know the difference between shit you’re not supposed to say and shit you just think you shouldn’t!” he crowed triumphantly. “It’s like- okay, most of the time when there’s something you think you should keep your mouth shut about, it doesn’t actually matter- it’s not that important.” He illustrated his renewed direction with sharp hand gestures. “A lot of the things people think need to be kept secret are- people make things important when they’re not, and I’ve never been able to keep my mouth shut, so I know better because I’ve fucked up so much. I still do it sometimes, I still avoid talking about things, because I don’t like to think too much and I know my friends will overthink things, but I also know when I’m doing that- and I feel like you do, too.”

Levi’s expression was beginning to look guarded and wary.

“You know better,” Eren said frankly. “This whole thing isn’t that big of a deal- the worst thing that could happen is Hanji saying no, but Erwin’s made it into this big thing in his head, and you know it isn’t like that. You’re right: this isn’t middle school. Erwin and Hanji are adults, and it’s not going to kill him if they say no, but he’s not going to say anything about it because he’s convinced himself everything will change if he does.”

Levi was starting to shift contentiously, jaw tight. “Oh, so he thinks that way, does he? And I know better, do I?” he asked softly.

“Yeah,” he answered, “yeah, you do. And you know you do. And I think you’re just pissed off because when you told me, you wanted me to tell you that you were right for not getting involved even though you know better.” He looked at his nails and wondered, for the first time in a while, if he was ruining everything for himself again. “Levi, you’re- your life is fucked up. Erwin’s in love with Hanji, Hanji has a thing for Petra, Petra has a crush on you- have you even told her you’re not interested?”

Levi’s uncomfortable expression told him everything he needed to know about that.

“It’s just going to keep happening forever, and nobody’s ever going to get over anything if nobody talks about it, and yeah, you don’t really get to say it’s none of your business, because you’re the only person who knows this doesn’t have to be a big fucking deal.”

Levi said nothing, but he wouldn’t meet Eren’s eye.

“You don’t get to be right just because you don’t like to talk about things that make you uncomfortable.”

He wasn’t sure what he’d expected, but it wasn’t what he got.

“I know.”

It was all Levi said- very quietly, barely above the sound of the water against the shore and the rustling of the leaves.

The silence stretched between them awkwardly.

“I know you do,” Eren offered, and Levi laughed a little as shifted, sighing through his nose.

“What a mess,” he mumbled after a moment.

“I know, right? I can’t believe you put up with it,” Eren teased, and that earned him something that was almost an actual smile.

Levi looked at him and blinked.

“Wait, are you still in your pyjamas?”


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Special thanks to BlakeBroflovski for the headcanon about what kind of drunk piece of shit Levi is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DID YOU REALLY THINK I WAS GOING TO LET THIS FIC DIE? 
> 
> Not a fucking chance. I love this shit too much. Kill me and then it will die.

The fight was over- really over, in a sense that wasn’t simply a matter of letting the issue simmer unaddressed in the background- and the tension had broken between them, but Eren could see that just being present while Erwin and Hanji interacted was making Levi slightly uncomfortable.

He did not expect the repercussions of that.

“What do you drink, Eren?”

He was elbow-deep in hot dishwater when he looked up at Hanji, caught off-guard by the question. “Huh?”

“Erwin’s having a rum and coke and Levi just asked me where we keep the gin, so I figured it was only fair to include my favourite in the festivities- what are you having, Eren?”

He looked at Levi, half-expecting him to protest that he was too young to be drinking.

When he caught his eye, Levi just looked back at him, frowning.  “What the hell are you looking at me for? I don’t know what you like to drink.”

Eren watched soap bubbles pop on his forearms for a moment as he processed that. “Do you have any beer?” he finally answered. He could hear Armin scolding him for answering a question with another question in the back of his mind. “I’ve only ever really drank beer.”

Hanji made a peculiar sound- something like a cross between a click of the tongue against their teeth and a hiss- and began to pull cupboards open over Levi’s head, trapping him between their chest and the bend of the counter. “Well, all college students like vodka, but I’ve also got rum, gin, whiskey- rye and bourbon, but there might be some scotch in the garage-oh? How long has this bottle of peppermint schnapps been here? Erwin, do you remember? I think it might’ve been the Christmas before last-”

“Move it, shiteyes,” Levi snapped, elbowing them sharply in the side after one last futile attempt to discreetly worm his way out of the corner he’d been trapped in. “You’re giving him too many options.”

Eren pulled the plug from the drain of the sink and wiped his hands on his pants absentmindedly as he watched Levi snatch two glasses from the rack under Hanji’s reaching arm.

Ice first, then a layer of something clear but pungent- the gin, he assumed- and finally, another clear something, but bubbly. The liquid in the glasses kept rising until the ice came to a rattling halt near the lip, and then Levi shoved one into his hand.

“Gin and tonic,” he said without explanation before lapsing into impatient silence.

Eren tried a sip.

For a split-second, it wasn’t bad.

And then it was.

In the future, Eren would go on to insist quite vehemently to anyone who would listen that the indescribable taste lingering in the back of his mouth was ‘actually the worst’.

He made an awful sound. He was only vaguely aware of Levi speedily straightening his tilting hand and plucking the glass from it.

“Ah,” Levi said placidly, by all appearances completely unconcerned, “tonic water’s not for everyone.” At first, Hanji looked somewhat expectant, but when Levi walked away with both drinks, they just looked amused.

“I’ll mix you a rum and coke,” they chuckled, not even trying to hide their amusement at the variety of faces he could feel himself making. As they handed it to him, they added a whispered, “don’t tell Levi I used to more than a single shot,” and winked at him conspiratorially.

It was better, and as he sipped it, his brain wound far enough up out of the haze of disgust and confusion for him to process what was happening again.

“Oh man,” he breathed, “I wanna see Levi drunk.”

It was out of his mouth before he could restrain it, but Levi’s only response was to level him a pitying stare while Hanji laughed uproariously beside him.

They slung an arm companionably around his shoulders and grinned down at him. “I like your style, Eren.”

“Don’t encourage him,” Levi muttered, draining one glass and placing it on the table before switching the other to his dominant hand.

“Doesn’t he remind you of me from back when we were in basic, though?”

Levi made a face that was almost too similar to a small child swallowing cherry cough syrup. “One: no,” he said, raising a finger. “And two: no. Do me a favour and never make that comparison again.”

“Basic?” Erwin mused from the door. “I didn’t know the two of you back then, did I?”

“No, you were already running your dojo at that point,” Hanji shot over their shoulder, waving their free hand dismissively.

Levi shot Erwin a sneer over his glass. “Don’t act like you don’t remember, you prick. You harassed me until I joined.” His eyes flicked back to where Eren was still lingering with a drink in his hand and Hanji’s arm around his shoulders, and he jerked his chin in their direction. “And you- good luck. I don’t get drunk.”

“I remember things differently,” Erwin was saying when Eren interrupted him with a,

“I thought you said you were drunk when-”

before hastily snapping his mouth closed and smiling sheepishly.

He could feel Hanji’s stare boring into the side of his face.

Levi looked like he was regretting everything.

“I used to get drunk,” he snapped irritably, raising his voice to be heard over Hanji’s hushed demands to be let in on the secret. “But stupid shit happens when I get drunk, so I stopped.”

He was, to be perfectly frank, mystified by Levi’s logic.

“Wait,” Eren started, “what?”

“I don’t get drunk anymore,” Levi insisted seriously, gin and tonic in hand.

He thought he could almost understand Levi’s logic if he squinted, so that’s exactly what he did. “Wait,” he said slowly, “so… you don’t drink as much anymore, and you don’t get drunk.”

“No,” Levi told him, almost as though Eren had said something very stupid, “when I drink, I drink like I used to- I just don’t get drunk now,” he finished confidently, as though that was not an utterly absurd thing to say.

Eren turned slowly to look at Hanji, who looked like the effort of holding back their laughter was close to forcing tears out of their eyes.

“He’s joking, right?” he whispered.

“Not at all,” they whispered back, one glittering tear finally breaking free to roll over the crest of their cheekbone, “this is gonna be so fucking good.”

***

It was, in fact, ‘so fucking good,’ in a very peculiar way.

Levi, as it turned out, was exactly the kind of drunk Eren had never expected him to be but suddenly couldn’t imagine him not being: the boisterous, forceful, but strangely lucid kind.

He spoke louder than Eren had ever heard him speak- suddenly, all of his previous words seemed like whispers.

He was somehow even more abrupt- the greetings of yesterday suddenly seemed practiced and reasonable by comparison.

He was-

Eren didn’t know he would call it affectionate.

All he knew was that at some point, Levi had tucked his hand in Eren’s back pocket and he had yet to remove it.

The constant pressure of his hand against his ass was a strange sort of reminder.

He felt, strangely, a lot like he had the first time Duchess had looked at him with those commanding yellow eyes and placed her paw on him like she was his and always would be.

Maybe it was the similarity in facial structure- Levi had the same sort of small, angular face.

Maybe it was the alcohol.

He didn’t know.

What he did know, awkwardly, was that he had discovered something else about himself in the process.

He did not object to being laid claim to.

Not even _remotely._

***

He’d thought he’d be drunken, and somehow, he’d never been able to picture Levi drunk.

Maybe that was why he’d wanted to know so badly.

The fact of the matter was that he had enough experience with the tipsy slide from dragging his blunted fingernails up someone’s back to falling comfortably into a slightly drunken fuck to know it was happening.

Strong arms, muscular, rounded shoulders- Levi looked good above him.

He wondered if Levi would be okay with having their first time together be quite so intoxicated, and asked.

Levi paused in his ministrations to look at him with a frown. “I’m not drunk,” he insisted, far too loudly to be sober, “are you drunk?”

Eren looked at him, bemused. “A little.”

Levi’s frowned deepened, and he sat back on his heels. Eren enjoyed the sight of his erection straining against his jeans more than was probably necessary.

“We should probably wait, shouldn’t we?” Levi said finally, sounding simultaneously conflicted and convicted.

Eren had to fight a bemused smile. “Do you want to wait?” he asked.

Levi’s throat convulsed as he swallowed absentmindedly, and his eyes raked a much more obvious path down Eren’s body than Eren had ever seen them do sober.

“Not really,” he said finally, adding a halting, “but I will, if you want me to.”

Eren did not want him to.

The progression they made from kissing and grinding to Levi sliding his second finger up Eren’s ass was a strangely vague one, especially considering how much Levi was prone to complaining about the process of fingering.

“-damn unhygienic,” he complained again, and Eren frowned at him.

“I can do it if you don’t want to,” he insisted.

The look Levi shot him was downright affronted. “I want you to feel good,” he said fiercely, almost like Eren could not be trusted to be responsible for his own pleasure, “it can’t be helped.”

It was, all in all, a rather bewildering attitude towards the general preliminary stages of anal sex.

When it finally happened- also in a vague, warm, comfortably rum-filled cloud- he couldn’t find it in himself to complain.

The ground seemed to fall away as Levi hauled him up into his lap as he squatted, thrusting mostly methodically, but not always.

Eren didn’t particularly care.

While the stimulation of penetration was consistent and unexceptional, the way Levi’s eyes bored into him and the way his fingers dug into his ass as he held him up were downright intoxicating.

He could feel himself pushing the pleasant boundary between enjoying himself and mind-numbing orgasm when Levi suddenly stopped.

“Wha-” he started breathlessly, and then, somewhat confused, “did you come?”

“No,” Levi said tersely, leaning his forehead against Eren’s shoulder. “I have a fucking cramp.”

The expression he made as he lowered the both of them gingerly down onto the bed suggested it was, in fact, a very painful charley horse.

It was all Eren could do not to laugh.

To Levi’s credit, his erection was still unflaggingly stiff where it sat inside of Eren.

Once Levi settled down onto the bed and extended his leg with a laboured groan, Eren found himself riding it almost absentmindedly.

He had been right, after all: Levi had a _very_ good dick for anal.

“Goldilocks dick,” he thought or maybe said, if Levi’s baffled look was to be trusted. He didn’t care too much as he scraped his fingernails down his chest and felt the hips beneath him twitch upwards despite the cramp.

“Fucking beautiful,” he mumbled, and really meant it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you are a virgin and learn the principles of sex from anything I write, I hope it's this. I really, genuinely hope it is this, because this kind of goofy, frequently interrupted, ungainly sex is what you should expect from real life.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More than eight thousand words of emotional whiplash.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter just sort of... happened. I didn't plan most of this. It just was.

He woke up cold again.

The first thing he noticed was that though his eyes felt grainy at the corners, his eyelashes were sticky, glued to themselves and reluctant to part.

The second thing he noticed was the dryness of his mouth relative to the uncomfortably clammy wetness he found on the part of the pillowcase where his cheek was resting.

The third was, to his still-groggy surprise and delight, Levi.

Despite his bleary eyes, fuzzy teeth, and sandpapery tongue, he could feel a slightly silly smile pulling at his lips.

It was no wonder he’d awoken feeling cold- Levi lay facing away from him with his half of the sheets and blankets gathered uselessly around his feet and calves and most of his body exposed to the cool morning air.

The discrepancy in their desire for coverage meant that Eren’s half of the covers were pulling inconveniently downwards as well, but somehow even so, just the sight of Levi there was still the most incredible thing.

Eren tugged the blanket back over his exposed shoulder as he let his mind creep slowly into wakefulness. For a long while, he simply lay there and looked at him, marvelling sleepily at the unexpected novelty of what he was seeing.

It was with a sense of drowsy wonder that he realized it- until that moment, Levi had always seemed to be made of an altogether different substance than the rest of them.

Erwin was a very tall man with a proportionately large frame, but the combination of his long limbs, broad shoulders and narrow hips meant that the way his body looked from one day to the next had a curious sort of changeability to it- in the tailored suit Eren had met him in, he’d seemed endlessly tall and strikingly triangular, but in the grandfatherly sweater he’d worn the day before, he’d suddenly seemed indisputably solid and rectangular. Though he would never seem small, it was becoming more and more obvious to Eren that the clothes he wore seemed to change him in ways that made it difficult to tell which appearance was true to the body underneath and which was creating illusions in the eye that beheld it.

And, strangely, Hanji gave a similar impression for a far different reason- despite being a person whose rangy figure was obvious no matter what they wore, it wasn’t clothing that lent their body its peculiar fluidity, but _movement_. They moved in a way that flowed and ebbed in one moment and tumbled and clattered in the next- there were moments where he would swear they seemed composed entirely of bony knuckles and knobbly wrists and dangerously bladelike elbows, and moments later in the same hour where they seemed to liquefy into something sinuous, abruptly made up of nothing but long limbs coordinated by a sort of ethereal, molten grace, and as far as he could tell, the only predictor of the change had everything to do with their whims.

Being disinclined towards engaging in self-reflection hadn’t made Eren any less familiar with or less likely to notice the phenomenon- his own, less interesting version had plagued him since early adolescence. He knew perfectly well that he had that sort of totally unremarkable textbook example of a young adult body that was neither tall nor short, a body that wasn’t particularly broad or lean or muscular, and which perched indecisively between the triangular and the rectangular- and above it all, he had a face that routinely threw strangers into bickering as they tried in vain to guess at his age. Everything from his clothes to his hair to the way the light hit him transmuted the impression he made on others into something different from moment to moment. Something as small as removing his coat or smoothing down his hair could change him from sixteen to twenty-six, from twenty-six to sixteen.

Some mutability of impression was a fact of reality for most people, and Eren was far too visceral and physical a person not to notice such things.

But Levi-

Levi was different. Levi’s body was different. Levi’s body had always been different, or so he’d thought.

Standing or sitting, naked or clothed, Levi’s body had always seemed to cut through circumstantial factors with a decisive consistency that seemed absolute. No matter the context, he seemed to radiate a sort of inalterable solidity- something Eren could only clumsily identify as being centred around a kind of raw-boned stoutness that had been filled out, but not softened, by an abundance of well-conditioned muscle.

He had accepted without question or consideration that Levi’s body was just somehow different, that it was the exception to the rule, but lying on his side as Levi was then, it seemed nearly curvaceous, almost feline- like a lounging tiger or dozing jaguar, his robust muscularity only seemed to enhance the unfamiliar liquidity of his relaxed form, much to Eren’s fascination. He followed the curve of his ear and the bend of his jaw to the line of his throat and down, dipping his eyes into the inviting crook where Levi’s neck met and became one with the hard muscle of his upper back, and then he climbed the lazy slope of his shoulder until it crested and gave way to the fall of his arm, resting thick and heavy on a side that seemed to taper idly away into a waist made deceptively small by the way his spine was drawing down into the seductive call of the bedsprings, curving downwards before rising up again to meet the languid cant of his hips.

In all his short time knowing Levi, he had never seen anything like it, so he just lay there and marvelled.

He had, of course, already been aware of Levi’s body in a very real and active way, but somehow the true strength it promised had never seemed quite so tangible as it did then, when it was doing precisely nothing at all.

 _‘He’s always moving,’_ he realized suddenly, and it was true- even when he seemed at ease, Levi was never truly still for more an instant, and he was never relaxed. In those rare moments that he wasn’t pacing or gesturing, he was still active under the skin in little ways, jaw working and neck turning, shoulders rolling, hands fidgeting, hips shifting, feet checking and rechecking and changing their positions on the ground.

With a sense of strange, muted awe, Eren realized that he had never seen how different Levi could look when he was at rest because he’d never seen him be anything but incurably restless.

He suddenly wanted to touch him.

He knew, logically, that it would probably be inconsiderate to disturb him, especially considering the trouble he had with sleeping, but as the still-blue light of early summer morning crept across the bare skin of his hip and thigh, the enticingly languorous set of his body beckoned for touch in almost the same way the unguarded side of a housecat sleeping in a sunbeam seemed to.

He wanted so very, very badly to touch him.

He spent so long debating whether or not he should that he barely registered reaching out for him until his fingers ghosted over the soft skin beneath Levi’s ear, and then it was too late.

Levi rumbled groggily in response, which Eren found worrying, but he followed the action by tilting his head further into the pillow and exposing more of his neck, which Eren was pretty sure even Levi understood was generally agreed to be the universal sign for ‘I enjoy this, please keep doing it,’ so he felt at least relatively secure in his decision to give into the not inconsiderable urge to move closer and replace his hand with his lips.

Despite its hoarseness, the soft sigh he received as a response seemed to support this conclusion.

He’d only just begun to boldly explore the unprotected curve of Levi’s waist when Levi stiffened incrementally, groaned into his pillow, and grabbed Eren’s questing hand.

“Fuck,” Levi rasped after a moment of increasingly tense shifting, which didn’t exactly help Eren to know what his problem was.

He buried his nose and mouth in the nape of Levi’s neck in the vain hope that it was just a general response to what was probably a decent hangover.

“Ah, _fuck_ ,” Levi groaned again, squeezing his hand before releasing it with a sigh, which Eren was pretty sure meant it wasn’t, in fact, a response to his hangover.

He considered saying nothing on the off chance the problem would just go away if he didn’t address it, but the way Levi’s posture had shifted from relaxed to receptive to strangely defensive seem to suggest that he probably wouldn’t have much luck with that tactic, so he went with his second instinct, which involved slinging his arm around Levi’s waist and cuddling up to his back before speaking.

“What’s up?” he asked, mostly for a complete lack of ideas about what the issue could be. “Bad hangover?” he tried hopefully, just in case.

Levi grunted and then made a series of unhappy sounds that only might have been words into his pillow.

“Ah,” Eren said understandingly and hugged his waist, hoping he was coming across like he had any idea what the hell was going on.

Judging by the way Levi lifted his head from the pillow and shot him a bleary-eyed glance over his shoulder that was equal parts exasperated and miserable, he was not successful.

“Sorry,” Levi mumbled, grabbing his hand and squeezing it again.

Eren felt his mind preparing to twist itself in knots over not understanding what was happening and immediately succumbed to frustration without even attempting to resist.

“Why are you saying sorry?” he asked bluntly, starting to feel kind of irritated that what he’d been hoping would be a nice and maybe even sexy start to a good day was taking a fast turn for the decidedly uncomfortable and unsexy. “Levi,” he grumbled, both muddled by dehydration and quite possibly still very slightly drunk, “this is like the whole stupid bed thing all over again. I don’t know what your issue is.”

As soon as he said it, he flinched, expecting Levi’s frustration with him to flare, but instead the body in his arms just drew into itself.

Levi mumbled something unintelligible again.

Eren groaned loudly. “Please use real English, Levi,” he complained, and felt Levi stiffen with surprise before exhaling gustily.

“It wasn’t supposed to go like that,” he admitted quietly, and Eren just sort of stared vacantly at the back of his head for a minute, trying to identify what he was referring to, before giving up completely.

“What wasn’t?” Levi’s neck was still very inviting, regardless of the circumstances. He stared at it accusingly.

“The- when we- fuck it, you know, this. _Us_ ,” Levi said after a few seconds of garbled false starts. “It wasn’t supposed to go like that.”

“What?” Eren could feel himself sinking deeper and deeper into frustration. He took a deep breath to calm himself. “Like what?”

“Drunk,” Levi answered gruffly. “Really shitty way to start things off. Fuck.”

Something like static electricity jumped sluggishly from one loose wire in Eren’s head to another and he blinked and then squinted incredulously.

“Wait,” he started, letting go of Levi to sit up, “are you talking about the sex?” He could feel something nagging promisingly at him about Levi’s attitude and cast around clumsily for what it could be. “Is this like… a first time thing?” he wondered aloud, and took the way Levi ran a hand over his face unhappily as confirmation. “But last night, you said- wait, you know I’m not a virgin, right?” he clarified, still feeling distinctly bewildered. “I mean, I wasn’t a virgin- you didn’t think I- no, that doesn’t make any sense, there’s no reason you’d think I was a virgin.” He mulled it over a little more. “Were _you_ \- no, that doesn’t make sense either. I- okay, what the _fuck_ is going on right now?”

He only realized that Levi had rolled onto his back when he noticed the look of absolute exasperation being sent his way.

“Seriously, Eren?” Levi asked him, like everything should’ve been obvious.

“Seriously, Levi,” he parroted testily. “Okay, so- so what, your issue is just that we had sex while we were drunk, right?” he asked. “Okay. Alright. Sure, I- yeah, no, you know what, I don’t fucking get it. We had sex while we were drunk. So? So what? Well, yeah, I guess there’s that whole first time thing, but I fucking _asked_ you if you were cool with it because I know you get… weird about stuff like that sometimes, I guess, and- Levi, I’ve basically been begging for your dick for like,” he stopped to swallow against dryness and puzzle over the way Levi was covering his face with his hands like he couldn’t believe what was happening, “um, like… a month? More? But every time I’ve gone for it, you haven’t been interested and I wasn’t gonna push it, so it wasn’t like I- I mean, you know I wasn’t gonna say no when you finally wanted to, and you said you were cool with it, but now you’re acting like it’s this huge deal and saying shit about how it ‘wasn’t supposed to go like that’ and-”

Something sparked a little more consistently and the light suddenly went on in his head.

He stopped mid-gesture and mid-word and slowly curled his lips into his mouth like it would help him swallow his words.

“I thought-” he started haltingly, “I-”

Levi still had his hands over his eyes, but his mouth was tight and unhappy. Eren watched his throat bob anxiously.

“I just thought you weren’t really all that interested,” he said, feeling all the more awkward for how unused to being careful he was. “I thought you just didn’t really care if we fu- if we had sex, I mean.” He tasted blood and realized he’d started chewing the inside of his lip without realizing it. “I didn’t- I didn’t think you were,” he hesitated, feeling a very strange kind of apprehensive and more than a little foolish, “waiting for… something? Like… the right time, or-”

Levi released a very small, very embarrassed-sounding groan and moved his hands to cover the rest of his face.

Something took a hard left in Eren’s chest in a way that was both very silly and genuinely quite alarming, considering how completely unprepared he was to cope with it.

“Hey,” he coaxed gently, pulling at Levi’s wrists to test how resistant to rejoining the real world he seemed to have become.

The answer was very, apparently. It was actually more than a little funny, in Eren’s eyes, especially considering how Levi’s ears seemed to have taken on the same flushed hue as his throat, but he didn’t think Levi would appreciate it if he laughed.

“Hey,” he said again, running his fingers through Levi’s hair and leaning his cheek against his shoulder for a moment. “Sorry.”

Levi made a muffled sound that could’ve been a laugh or another groan.

“You know, we’re still in bed, so it’s kind of like it’s still the first time, right?” he tried.

Levi moved one of his hands to give him a look that suggested he had questions about Eren’s intelligence.

“No, seriously,” Eren insisted, “it’s like- we’re both sober now, and we woke up together, so that’s pretty cute, right?” 

Levi’s hands slowly retreated into his hair as he considered that. Ultimately, he just snorted, but it seemed less derisive than it was tired and a little amused, so Eren took it as a positive reaction. “I don’t think that’s how that works, Eren,” he mumbled, eyes closed and mouth pulled a little to the side like he’d eaten something bad.

Eren ran a hand down his chest appreciatively, at least reasonably assured that the worst of Levi’s strange crisis was behind them. “Who says, though?” he mused. “We’re on vacation- well, sort of, because I guess I’m kind of on vacation already, but still- uh, we don’t really have to worry about Hanji overhearing us at this point, because I’m pretty sure that’s already happened-” the pained groan Levi responded to that with made him laugh despite himself “-and, um, we woke up together and everything, I know I already said that, but that’s the sort of thing people who care about this stuff like, right?” Levi shot him a look that somehow managed to suggest that he was being ridiculous despite being absolutely correct. “And hey, last night could’ve been worse- it  wasn’t terrible or anything, and we used a condom, so it wasn’t like we were unsafe-”

The reason why admitting to having condoms in his bag could be a point of contention between them returned to Eren at precisely the moment that Levi visibly made the same connection.

“Wait,” he started slowly, and Eren felt his face starting to do that thing it did where it responded to the realization that he’d fucked up and was about to get called out on it by plastering a strained, nervous smile on his face.

“Uh,” he smiled awkwardly.

“ _Wait,_ ” Levi said, narrowing his eyes, “you have condoms. You’ve had condoms this entire time- I knew something was bothering me about that last night.”

“Er,” he smiled uncomfortably.

“That’s- when we- you fucking _lied_ to me,” Levi accused, sitting up. Eren took slight comfort in the fact that he looked only marginally more furious than he looked horribly exasperated. “ _Eren_.”

“Yeah, about that, uh,” Eren floundered. His cheeks were starting to hurt. “Well, I- I didn’t _say_ I didn’t have condoms?” Levi did not look even remotely appeased. “Oh god, I didn’t think this through.”

“Yeah, no shit. You do know _why_ this is a problem, right?” Levi asked him sharply.

“Safety?” he responded automatically, and then held up a hand and corrected himself. “Trust. This is a trust thing. Not saying something when you should is still a form of dishonesty.”

The way Levi’s eyebrows began to rise gave Eren the strange feeling he’d somehow screwed up again.

“Oh,” Levi exhaled, looking quite possibly the least impressed Eren had ever seen him. “Well, that answers my next question,” he mused. “So this is an ongoing issue.”

It wasn’t a question.

The cool room suddenly felt much too warm and close. He could hear the blood thrumming in his ears. “Yeah.” He swallowed and looked fixedly at the wall above Levi’s head. “This is, uh, an ongoing issue.”

Levi’s sigh sounded exhausted. “Eren.”

“Yeah?”

“This could be a problem.”

“Yeah.” His face was starting to feel stiff and plastic in an unpleasantly familiar way. “Yeah, I fucked up.” He swallowed against the dry lump forming behind his tonsils. “Again. Yeah. You, uh, don’t have to tell me what that says about me. I know.” He let his eyes slide down the wall to Levi’s left. “I know what that says about me. People really like to tell me what that says about me.”

The room was so quiet he was sure Levi could hear his ragged breathing catching in the tightness of his throat.

Eren just stared out the window, waiting.

“Eren,” Levi said softly.

“Mhm?” It wasn’t even a problem acknowledgement, but he didn’t trust himself. The skin between his eyes felt strained and tight. He was having trouble breathing around the unwanted egg in his throat.

“Look at me.”

He jerked his head to the side, just a little, and only once. It wasn’t even a proper no.

“Eren,” Levi started again, more insistently, and he drew in a shaky breath before swallowing again.

His jaw ached. He realized suddenly that he was clenching his teeth.

“Eren,” Levi said very slowly in a very strange, baffled-sounding sort of way, “why… what hell is with this reaction?”

It wasn’t what he’d expected, and in his surprise, he met Levi’s eyes for a split-second before looking away, too aware that he looked like a hunted animal.

“This is, uh- this is usually the part where people realize I’m not worth having around,” he bit out, trying for cavalier matter-of-factness. He began working his jaw back and forth to try and loosen some of the tension in it. “Yeah, at, um- at this point I know better than to fight it- never does me any fucking good.” He could feel the anger and resentment bubbling inside of him and took a deep, steadying breath. “You’re thinking I don’t fucking learn from my mistakes, and that if I haven’t by now, I’m probably never going to- and you know what? You’re right. Yeah. I don’t learn, and trying isn’t good enough. So yeah. I mean, I knew it was gonna happen sooner or later,” he joked tightly before clenching his jaw until his teeth felt like they might break.  “I just thought it was gonna be later, so. Yeah.”

He heard Levi take and release a deep breath and braced himself, eyes barely focusing on the trees outside the window.

“I’m no fucking good at this, Eren,” he mumbled awkwardly.

“Never gets easier, trust me,” he reassured with a mechanical laugh. “But I’m told I’m pretty good practice,” he added bitterly.

Levi made a sound he recognized as sighing through his nose, and something wrenched painfully in him at the realization of just how much he’d let himself notice and remember.

“See, this is exactly what Armin was talking about, but I never fucking listen to him,” Eren muttered, “I honestly don’t know why he still puts up with-”

“Eren, shut up,” Levi interrupted, and he jerked, teeth clacking together painfully as his mouth snapped shut. “I don’t particularly appreciate being told what to do, especially not by a kid who seems to have problems with not talking out of his ass.”

Eren whipped his head to look at him, startled and confused.

Levi was looking at him with a mixture of exhaustion and desperately threadbare patience tempered by what looked like bleak amusement.

“I wasn’t-”

“You were,” he said firmly. “Look, I don’t advocate sticking around when shit is clearly not working- _but_ ,” he started when Eren flinched. “But,” he repeated, “to be perfectly honest with you, I don’t really get the feeling your relationships end because they _can’t_ work.”

Eren couldn’t help the hurt look he sent Levi. “Wha- what the hell does that mean?”

Levi levelled him a pitiless stare. “It means it seems an awful lot like you decided I was done with you the second I called you out on something, which could mean one of two things,” he explained crisply. “The first possibility is that you think I’m the sort of person who expects you to perfect- or, at least, the sort of person who expects you to instantly fix anything about yourself I don’t like, which is almost as hilarious as it is incredibly fucking insulting.”

Eren made a strangled noise, trying for words and coming up with nothing.

“The second possibility,” Levi continued, “is that you don’t think there’s any point in addressing the issue, which isn’t a hell of a lot better, considering what that might mean about your attitude towards our relationship.”

The hot thrum of blood in his ears was spreading heat over his face. He wasn’t sure how to feel.

 “Eren-”

There was something very grim in Levi’s carefully blank expression.

His eyes were watchful. “Eren,” he started again, “is this not worth fixing to you?”

Eren tried desperately to sound composed, but what came tumbling out was a croaking, “It’s not that I don’t want to-”

He snapped his mouth shut, closed his eyes and tried to swallow down the nauseous surge of confused answers that had risen in his throat like bile.

“It’s not that I don’t want to fix this,” he said stiffly. “It’s that I don’t know how to fix this. I don’t know if I even can, or if I should, because now you’re going to look at me differently, and you’re not going to trust me, and-”

The words were starting to rise and tangle up on his tongue again, and he could feel heat starting to sting at the corners of his burning eyes, and Levi, quite frankly, just looked absolutely bewildered.

“Eren, you lied about having condoms because you wanted to suck my dick without one,” he interrupted, sounding almost exasperated. “This is not the end of the world- it’s something we need to talk about, because you absolutely cannot fucking pull shit like that and you’ve clearly had issues with it in the past, but it’s not the end of the fucking world.” He had his hands spread and lifted, palms out, like he didn’t know what to do with them. “The problem here is that you’re fucking impulsive and you have a bad habit of letting yourself get carried away doing things you know better than to do- it’s an issue because it’s become a habit, and a bad one.”

Eren looked at him uncertainly.

“You’re twenty,” Levi told him, “and if being an impulsive, thrill-seeking shithead isn’t the most goddamn college-age thing I’ve ever heard in my life, then I don’t know what is.” He looked lost and tired. “It’s a normal problem to have at your age, but the way you’re reacting to being called out on it, you’d think I caught you fucking Erwin on the dock or something, so I have to ask: who the hell have you been hanging around that you think this shit is such a massive problem, and what did you do to them to piss them off so much?”

Eren blinked, caught between jittery tension and the weird emptiness of tentative relief, and looked down at his hands. “Um.” He needed to cut his fingernails. “It’s- well, I- everyone, I guess. Everybody says I should know better by now. I’m supposed to have grown out of this, right?”

If he’d only had Levi’s answering expression to go by for context, he would’ve assumed he’d just said something incredibly stupid.

“Who the hell is _everyone_?” Levi asked him rudely. “Your friends? They’re the same age as you. What the fuck do they know? Your parents? If you don’t have shitty parents, they’re going to worry about you no matter what you do- the point is to make sure they never find out about your fuckups, not to never fuck up.” He was squinting like there was something behind Eren’s conflicted expression he couldn’t quite make out. “If it’s teachers, well, fuck, teachers have to put up with hundreds of shithead kids like you day after day. Teachers are stand-in parents that don’t love you and can’t do anything meaningful to punish you when you act up, so they get frustrated and they say stupid, hurtful shit all the time, it’s a broken system,” he complained. He paused, scrutinizing Eren’s face for a moment. “Exes?”

Eren flinched without meaning to.

Levi sighed.  “Eren-” He ran a hand over his face and then grimaced at his palm like he didn’t like what he’d found there. “Okay, I’m not-”

He cleared his throat. It was a wet, unpleasant sound. Eren watched his pulse flutter under the skin below his jaw.

Levi shot him a wry, tired look that was almost a smile. “I’ll be the first to admit I’m not an expert on relationships,” he admitted gruffly. “I haven’t had many, and they haven’t lasted long.”

Eren startled at that, mouth moving before he’d had a chance to think about why it shouldn’t. “Why? But you- why wouldn’t they last very long?”

Levi was looking at him oddly.

“You’re great,” Eren told him, just a little self-consciously, “I mean, I’m a fuckup, so it makes sense for me, but you’re... you’re great. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re great.”

Levi’s eyebrows were raised in what could only be called utter disbelief. “That is adorable,” he said suddenly in a tone that suggested he had mixed feelings about it. “I have no idea what the hell kind of image you’ve gotten of me in your head, kid, but it’s wrong, and I think you’re going to be disappointed once the… ‘new toy’ phase passes.” Before Eren could protest, he made a sharp little dismissive motion with his hand. “But never mind that- exes. Look, Eren, relationships are fucking complicated no matter what kind they are. All relationships are complicated.”

“But-”

Levi cut him off with an impatient grunt. “You’re about to bring up some fucking couple you knew in high school that seemed perfect and happy and all that shit or, I don’t know, you’re going to bring up your best friend’s parents, or, god fucking forbid, your own parents,” he sighed. “Here’s the thing: just because you don’t see the issues happening doesn’t mean they don’t happen. All relationships- friends, family, lovers- all of that shit requires negotiation. People get involved with each other, and people fuck up. We’ve talked about this before- everybody always fucks up a least once in a while, and it’s what you do afterwards that decides how things are going to go.” His eyes were restless compared to the stony set of his face. “All relationships need to be negotiated, but people have this idea about… romance and shit like that where they think it’s the exception, and that’s why things go so fucking sour all the time. We’ve started expecting them to.”

There was something so resonant, so that just sounded so fundamentally _right_ about what Levi was saying that Eren didn’t realize he was leaning forward to listen until he nearly tipped over and had to catch himself.

Levi sighed again. “When I say you’re part of the Disney generation, I don’t say it really meaning I’m not,” he started. “This isn’t new, the whole… ‘one true love’ and ‘happily ever after’ thing people expect from each other. Erwin is older than me and he doesn’t just _look_ like a fucking fairy tale prince.” Eren laughed, and Levi looked a little gratified by that. “Christ, and you think I don’t have personality problems? Eren, you called me out on why I don’t want to do anything about Erwin’s stupid crush on Hanji and I bit your goddamn head off over it.” He grimaced, glancing at the door like he suspected one of the two to come bursting in at any moment. “You take criticism like you expect somebody to beat your ass over it, but that’s still a hell of a lot better than going fucking nuclear every time someone points out something you don’t want to admit to. I’m not perfect. I get that being realistic about shit makes me seem a hell of a lot smarter and more patient than I am, but I’m also fourteen years older than you and I guarantee you I was a bigger asshole at twenty than you ever will be.”

Eren wasn’t sure whether or not he was supposed to laugh at that. He started to ask, but there was something in the acute discomfort hiding in the lines of Levi’s expression that stopped even him.

“We’re taught our entire lives that you’re going to meet someone who’ll love you no matter what,” Levi continued, clearly eager to move on from the subject of his misspent youth. “We start off looking for that, and the problem with looking for things is that when you look for something in people, you will find exactly what you’re looking for- you’ll see the parts of someone you want to see, and most of the time, they’ll be more than happy to cover up the ones you don’t, at least in the beginning.” He looked wistful, but not in an entirely pleasant way. “That’s why people walk out of relationships saying shit like ‘he changed’ or ‘she wasn't the person I fell in love with.’ But you didn’t change. The person you were with, they didn’t change. Unless something extreme happens, people don’t really change in that kind of timeframe- it’s just that once you get to know someone well enough, the parts of them that attracted you stop controlling everything about how you look at them. You start to actually notice things you brushed off before. Habits that used to seem funny or cute turn into things you can’t seem to stop complaining about to your friends. Things that never bothered you turn into things you can’t stand, but you’re still stuck in that idea that it’s supposed to be perfect without trying, so nothing gets brought up until you’re screaming at each other about it.”

Eren knew he was making an awful face. “That sounds… familiar.”

Levi’s answering look was terribly wry. “No shit. Well, as long as no one’s thrown a glass teapot at your head, you’re doing better than me.” He said it like a joke, but Eren had the strangest feeling it wasn’t one. “Exes will say terrible shit to you, and about you, and about things you never realized bothered them, and most of the time, it’s because they were so busy pretending everything was perfect that they let everything that wasn’t build up inside them. Once you breakup, they just explode, and the way we look at relationships encourages that- if things don’t sound bad enough to someone, they’ll make them worse in their head so they don’t have to consider that maybe they weren’t perfect, either.” His lips thinned. “Eren, what did your exes do wrong?”

Eren blinked and floundered. “Uh.”

Levi continued to look at him.

“Nothing?” He didn’t mean for it to sound like a question. “I mean, I’m sure there were things that weren’t that great, but I always fucked up first, so-”

Levi clicked his tongue against his teeth and pointed at him accusingly. “How?”

“Huh?”

“How did you fuck up?”

Eren gaped. “Wha- well, I- I did things I wasn’t supposed to, and-”

“You did things that changed how they looked at you,” Levi corrected sharply. “Which means they thought you were something you weren’t. But if you don’t pretend to be something you’re not, most people will catch on and lose interest before you ever get to the point where shit can blow up, and that means you’ve been encouraging them to see what they want to in you, like it’s impossible that anyone’d still like you if you didn’t.”

Levi’s tone was coolly factual, but Eren saw him realize what he’d inadvertently said at the same time that the meaning of it skewered him in the gut.

“I didn’t mean-” Levi started, visibly uncomfortable.

“That’s-” He furrowed his eyebrows, trying desperately to ignore the well of tears burning threateningly at his eyes. “Wow, that’s a little too- can we stop talking about this?”

“Yes,” Levi answered immediately. “Sorry. I’m no fucking good at this sort of thing, Eren. Sorry.”

He laughed, burying his head in Levi’s shoulder and willing away the mortifying possibility that he might still cry. Levi patted his back awkwardly.

He smiled again his skin. “Man, we’re a mess.” He felt more than heard Levi’s huff of amusement.

Even through the sourness of his own breath and the slightly off smell of Levi’s dried sweat, there was something resolutely appealing about the underlying scent of his skin, and Eren focused on it to distract himself.

As his agitated heartbeat slowed to a more normal pace in his chest, coaxed into calmness by the calloused hand stroking his spine and the warm shoulder against his cheek, he found his hand wandering down Levi’s chest. Even with one eye blocked by its position over Levi’s collarbone, he could see that Levi, not quite cross-legged and slightly hunched forward to accommodate Eren’s leaning, was not so different after all- his posture had transformed his spare skin and what little abdominal fat lay beneath it into two soft rolls over his stomach.

For some reason, the sight made him smile.

As his fingers explored further, Levi shivered under his hand.

“Seriously, Eren?” he mumbled, and all at once Eren realized that he could see very clearly with his one unobstructed eye the effect his ministrations were beginning to have.

He grinned. “You know,” he started conversationally, scratching his fingernails down Levi’s side teasingly, “up until yesterday, I honestly believed that you had basically no interest in having sex with me.”

Levi grunted as Eren ran his fingers down from his hip to his thigh, but said nothing.

Eren turned his mouth into the skin below of Levi’s throat as he fumbled his way to awkwardly cupping the shaft of Levi’s half-formed erection. He chuckled when it twitched under the weight of his palm. “Honestly had me convinced,” he breathed, worrying the shell of his ear with his teeth.

Levi exhaled, free hand coming up to grab at his hip. “I’m not blind or asexual, Eren,” he said tightly, the fingers of his other hand wandering into Eren’s hair. “Just careful.”

“And stubborn,” Eren added cheekily. Levi squeezed his hip lightly.

“I don’t like to be rushed,” he admitted, turning his face towards Eren’s.

Their lips met for far briefer a moment than Eren would’ve liked before Levi pulled back, grimacing.

“Your breath is terrible,” Levi told him frankly, and then frowned again. “My breath is terrible.”

“We could go brush our teeth,” Eren suggested.

Levi shook his head and began to pull away, much to Eren’s dismay. “If we go out there, we’re not going to be able to come back in without everybody knowing exactly what we’re doing.”

Eren refrained from pointing out that the everybody in question would probably know what they were doing, regardless.

Levi held something out to him.

“Gum?” He took a piece before he understood why. “Oh. That works, too- I was thinking we could just avoid kissing for now, but gum works.”

Levi grimaced at him like the suggestion of not kissing was causing him pain. “This isn’t _Pretty Woman_ ,” muttered, shuffling the gum tray back into the package as he chewed his own. “Jesus.”

Eren paused mid-chew to look at him inquisitively.

Levi looked even more pained. “Oh god, that movie came out before you were born.”

For lack of anything meaningful to say, Eren blew a bubble at him and shrugged before crawling forward hopefully.

Levi dodged his kiss with a warning click of his tongue. “Spit out your gum first,” he ordered. “I don’t need you choking on it.”

He swallowed the dirty joke he was tempted to make and the gum all at once, and then looked blankly at Levi when he offered him a tissue to spit into.

There was a split-second of confusion before Levi caught on. “Eren, you’re not supposed to swallow gum,” he reproached, looking exasperated.

“The ‘seven years in your stomach’ thing is a myth,” Eren pointed out, and then kissed him when he looked inclined to argue.

The difficulty with kissing someone unprepared to be kissed was, of course, that the shape of their mouth was inevitably wrong for the action, but he didn’t end up kissing Levi’s teeth and Levi was fairly quick to relent and reciprocate, so all in all, he considered it a successful initiation.

The fact that they were both still naked from the night before was convenient, and he took great pleasure in the lack of resistance his hands met when he reached for places he’d become accustomed to encountering thick cotton or stiff denim.

He liked skin. He liked Levi’s skin.

He decided quite unambiguously that he liked Levi naked, and would greatly appreciate it if Levi wore less clothes in the future.

When he dragged his blunted but slightly overgrown fingernails lightly up Levi’s bare back, Levi shuddered and grabbed his wrists, one and then the other, pushing him back and pinning him to the bed.

His pupils were blown so wide his husky-bright eyes looked dark under their heavy lids.

“Eren,” he groused, “don’t rush me.”

The request gave him the overwhelming urge to do precisely the opposite, and it must have shown on his face, if the way Levi began to release his wrists and then clearly thought better of it was to be trusted.

Only as Levi’s mouth began to wander from his own to his throat did he realize suddenly that he’d been pursuing him so eagerly that he’d never given Levi the chance to touch him as he might have liked to.

It wasn’t perfect- he’d managed to carry on sexual relationships long enough to know the difference- but nothing ever was, at first. It would take time for Levi to learn when he wanted him to linger and when he didn’t, but the thrill of how new it all was rendered the unfamiliarity of it more exciting than frustrating, and he started squirming against Levi’s hold on him fairly quickly.

Levi glanced at him from his position just below his collarbone. “Want me to let go?”

“Yeah,” Eren panted.

Levi quirked an eyebrow. “I have the feeling I know how this is going to end,” he murmured drily, letting go anyway.

He was, in fact, right. Eren buried one hand in his hair and scratched the other one up his back almost immediately, impatient not to be the only one so desperate for more.

Levi groaned into his skin. It took a moment for Eren to understand that the something gripping his jaw was Levi’s hand.

“You,” Levi grumbled, “are shit at being patient.”

“Sounds about right,” he acknowledged easily, doing it again and glorying in the way Levi’s breath hitched when he did. “But it’s hard to be patient. I want you,” he purred. “I want you to fuck me.”

Levi’s eyes widened incrementally. He rested his forehead on Eren’s shoulder.

“You’re a dirty talker,” he commented, and it wasn’t a question. “I don’t know why I expected anything else.”

Eren hummed, continuing to slide and scratch his way up and down Levi’s back. “Well, most of the time I’ve been really worked up, I’ve ended up with your dick in my mouth, so there’s that, and I’m told I’m a lot harder to understand when I’m drunk,” he clarified, pleased by the ruddy hue of Levi’s ears. “It’s not that surprising you didn’t notice.” He wrapped his legs around Levi’s waist mischievously and tilted his head to whisper into his ear. “God, you’re so fucking sexy, you don’t even _know_. I want you so bad. I want you to fuck me with your perfect dick.”

Levi made a strangled sound that sounded like even it couldn’t decide how it felt about the situation.

Eren laughed and played with his hair. “I can stop if you don’t like it,” he said reluctantly. “You might have to remind me, though- I don’t actually notice I’m doing it half the time.”

Levi groaned into his shoulder. “It’s not that I don’t like it,” he started, and Eren laughed without meaning to.

“Levi,” he hummed affectionately, “I don’t mean to _rush_ you or anything, but I’d _really_ appreciate it if you’d hurry up and fuck me.” When he shivered and began to stir somewhat sluggishly from his place in Eren’s shoulder, Eren squeezed his waist with his thighs, grinding his hips up in frustration. “I want you to fuck me until I can’t walk,” he purred, scraping his nails over Levi’s scalp and delighting somewhat wickedly in how flustered he clearly was. “I wanna see you fucking lose it while you’re pounding me.”

“Holy shit, Eren,” Levi mumbled, cutting off his stream of filth with a rather forceful kiss. Eren could feel the heat radiating off of his face. He could also feel the weight of his erection pressing against his thigh. “Are you planning on keep this up the entire time?”

Eren nipped at his lip playfully. “No, but I don’t actually plan most things,” he confessed, “so I probably will without meaning to. Sorry?”

Levi groaned. “Please don’t let Hanji or Erwin hear you,” he begged quietly between kisses. “Last night was bad enough.”

Eren hummed his agreement and Levi kissed once more, fiercely, before rolling back on his knees and casting around for the condoms and lubricant.

“Floor beside the nightstand,” Eren offered helpfully. “I knocked them off when you were fingering me.”

If Levi found his candid account of events slightly embarrassing, he hid it well, mostly by stretching over the side of the bed to search the floor.

As a warmer strain of light than he’d first noticed on waking lit Levi from the side, he realized he had no idea what time it was.

As he watched Levi primly roll a condom over his fingers and begin to coat it with lubricant, he realized he was seeing all the little details he’d missed the night before and abruptly stopped caring what time it was.

As Levi slipped one finger into him, Eren snorted. “You can start with two,” he instructed, running his hand up the arm Levi was leaning his weight on. “I’m not new to this.” Levi looked like he was going to argue, but he didn’t, and Eren sighed a little as his fingers began to work their way in and out of him at a careful pace. “Levi, I’m not going to break,” he complained.

The response he got was unintelligible. He hummed as a third finger worked its way in, grabbing Levi’s bicep encouragingly.

“Faster,” he demanded, panting a little as Levi obliged. “God, hurry and _fuck_ me already.”

“You’re not ready,” Levi protested, baulking.

“Then _make_ me ready,” he groaned, absently bucking his hips down on the hand beneath them.

Levi mumbled something that sounded a lot like a comment on having had bowel movements more patient than him, but he stopped trying to figure out the specifics of the comment when Levi withdrew his hand and stripped the condom off of his fingers, tossing it into the garbage can by the foot of the bed.

“Are you ready?” he asked, hesitating with his fingers poised to open the condom wrapper.

Eren was quite certain the entirety of his body language was asking ‘are you fucking kidding me right now?’

He groaned with relief as Levi shifted him into a more accessible position and began to push in. He wrapped his legs around his waist as Levi bottomed out inside him after what felt like a small eternity, meeting his kiss eagerly.

It was gentler than he was used to, gentler than he was expecting.

It was gentle in a way that was starting to make him feel a little shy.

“Levi,” he whispered, “you don’t have to go slow, it’s okay.”

Levi just leaned in and kissed him again, working an arm under the small of his back to hold him closer. “Just humour me,” he mumbled against Eren’s lips.

It wasn’t quite like anything Eren was used to- the details were the same, of course, from the occasional rude squelch or weird gasp to the way their skin stuck together and peeled apart uncomfortably as they began to sweat to the fumbling way they were both still learning what the other preferred by accidentally doing all the wrong things- but the way Levi kissed him and brushed his hair out of his face when it started to fall into his eyes, that was new.

It was nothing as trite as staring into each other’s eyes as they pretended there was anything elegant about what they were doing, but it was still unfamiliar, and for the first time in his life, Eren wished the room was darker.

There was something terribly vulnerable about it all- something he couldn’t quite put words to.

It wasn’t as though they could be having sex for the sake of anything but having sex, but somehow, it did not feel like sex for sex’s sake.

He buried his face in Levi’s shoulder, feeling strangely overstimulated.

“Levi, I-” he started, and then realized that, for once, he had no idea what he wanted to say.

He felt Levi’s quiet laugh where it caught in his throat. When he began to quicken his movements, kissing him more insistently and in a way that felt much more familiar, Eren let himself be swept away in it.

“Fuck me,” he whispered, giving in to the urge to palm Levi’s ass and use it to guide his hips into the rhythm he wanted. “Please, god, just fuck me already.”

The look Levi gave him was a mix of distracted and perplexed. “I’m already-”

“No, I want you to fucking _rail_ me,” Eren interrupted, biting at Levi’s lip. When Levi furrowed his brow like he wanted to protest, Eren buried his hands in his hair. “Just humour me,” he mimicked wryly.

Levi snorted but did his best to oblige him.

It wasn’t perfect- Levi accidentally kneeled on his thigh at one point, and Eren discovered the hard way that Levi had an extreme aversion to having anything put near the inside of his ears, especially something as unpleasantly wet as a tongue- but it was fun, even kind of funny, Eren thought when Levi laughed at him for farting unexpectedly after they’d disentangled themselves.

“Shit happens,” Levi told him drily. “Don’t worry about it.”

 _‘Shit happens,’_ Eren thought with a vague sense of having stumbled on something incredibly profound as he lazed through a heavy post-orgasm stupor. _‘Shit happens.’_

He supposed it did.


End file.
